Steven Jones' Latest Latest Research

Apparently his discussion of earthquake machines is off for now, being not quite half-baked. Instead, he's focusing his efforts on "free energy"; the crackpottery formerly known as perpetual motion. Get his breathless regurgitation of a fruitcake claiming to have stopped his studies of a new device after being visited by the men in black:

This last week was a nightmare for me, you have no idea under what pressure I have been and how many people contacted me, warnings that I should keep quiet... and in the end, yesterday, I had a personal visit after leaving my day to day job.

I had the impression that I live in a free country but it was demonstrated that anything is possible, we will never move forward.

Of course that is a very vague discussion that could mean anything. But another Truther has more on the miracle machine:

Romero had seemed very sincere and open about his device. It was also a hard slap in the face to everyone who had been preparing to replicate the setup. Forum members had invested their time getting ready to replicate, sacrificed materials in order to fabricate rotors/stators, and even spent their hard earned money purchasing components. As Romero stated in one of his posts, the device was not cheap to build. He expected the cost of a slightly larger scale version of the device to cost around one thousand dollars.

Yes, you heard that right, ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!

The same guy posts a link to this very entertaining film:


I love the guy who created the monster wheel. Like a ten-foot wheel wouldn't have been enough to demonstrate the concept. If you look carefully, you'll see it's just an extension of this:

The idea is based on a child's see-saw or teeter-totter. I'm sure most of us remember that if two children of the same weight got on one of those, but one moved closer to the middle while the other sat out at the end, that the former would be lifted in the air. So it makes sense that if you have extended weights on one side of a wheel, and the weights move in after they reach the bottom, that the wheel would turn. But the diagram above also shows the design problem; as you can see there are only four weights doing the work on the right side, while there are 8 weights being pulled upwards on the left.

Note as well that although the story ends with the wheel still spinning, there is no mention of it doing any practical work, like generating electricity.

In fairness to Jones, the one he's pushing seems more like the guy who charges batteries and then uses them to run the motor which charges more batteries....

But of course I don't want to spend the whole post on perpetual motion, as fruity as it is. No, we're still on 9-11 Truther idiocy around here, so check out the post on Jones at Troof Action. Our own Brian Good starts out well:

With four months to go before the anniversary, does he really think this is the best strategy for bringing good publicity to nanothermite?

I wouldn't be surprised if there are hairy hominids running around in British Columbia, but I don't think they're the best use of my time right now.

Note as usual the focus on PR, not the actual topic at hand. It's not whether perpetual motion or earthquake machines are nutty, it's whether they will make the Truthers look nutty.

But being Brian Good, it's only a few pages more before he indulges his inner lunatic:

Dr. Jones is certainly entitled to look at anything he wants to on his own time.

Frankly I wish he would look at the possibility that high-tech secret weapons were used on the twin towers, because I've never been able to see how gravity, conventional explosives, thermite, or nano-thermite could have pulverized the concrete floors of the twin towers in mid-air. I can't help wondering if Dr. Wood's incompetent assertions about exotic weapons was intended to make the whole field unpopular.

Yep, as we have noted in the past, Richard Gage is every bit as crazy as Judy when it comes to the "missing floors" and "pulverized concrete", and PetGoat Good isn't about to abandon Box Boy.

And Victronix isn't about to abandon Jones:

Even if Steve were investigating the idea that politicians might be reptiles from another planet, he is ultimately a scientist -- has been for his entire career -- and he would conduct an experiment and discover that the hypothesis had no basis, and move on. He doesn't just make fantastic assumptions and then publish them on a blog and say "it must be that way!" (ala David Griscom). Steve conducts research.

But isn't that the problem with reptilian theories--that there's really no way to test it?