Originally written Saturday, November 13, 2004

The Discovery Channel can be pretty entertaining, and when I’m home briefly between work and class I sometimes watch 15 or 20 minutes of it while I’m eating. (I like the shows they have about engineering and monster machines.)

Yesterday I watched almost a full program about the “Hutchison Effect”. The Hutchison Effect is supposedly a series of effects (it’s not just one) that a Canadian inventor, John Hutchison, invented. Here’s a summary from a webpage that describes it:

The Hutchison Effect occurs as the result of radio wave interferences in a zone of spatial volume encompassed by high voltage sources, usually a Van de Graff generator, and two or more Tesla coils.

The effects produced include levitation of heavy objects, fusion of dissimilar materials such as metal and wood (exactly as portrayed in the movie, “The Philadelphia Experiment”), the anomalous heating of metals without burning adjacent material, spontaneous fracturing of metals (which separate by sliding in a sideways fashion), and both temporary and permanent changes in the crystalline structure and physical properties of metals.

I was immediately skeptical, just from hearing them talk about it during the beginning of the show. It didn’t help that Hutchison looked a little eccentric, or that he did all of his ‘experiments’ in his apartment using cast-away Navy and Army surplus equipment.

This guy lives in an apartment that has to be seen to be believed, it’s packed chock full of all sorts of crap, although it looks pretty organized. I’m talking wall-to-wall oscilloscopes, digital readouts, metal boxes, dials, knobs, chains and pulleys.

They started showing clips of this “effect” in action, specifically ones that showed its apparent anti-gravity powers. Each clip was a fairly close up shot taken from about 5 feet. They showed a wooden floor (you could see the bottom of a broom sitting on the floor) and a household object sitting on it. The object would then move a little bit and then levitate off the screen! Stuff like nails, a hammer, a wrench, a bowl, a bottle of 7-Up, tin foil, etc.

This was pretty interesting, I thought, but hardly conclusive evidence. I was trying to think up ways that you could make an object “levitate” like that, say, using magnetism, when it showed a very interesting clip. The clip was of a cup of a thick white liquid or syrup, about the consistency of creamy plaster. You could see a glob form at the top of the liquid, then rise out of the cup and go up off the screen! It left behind a spike in the liquid, if you know what I mean – like it globbed upward, and when it separated there was a kind of liquid string pointing straight up.

This had me impressed. How could you make THAT levitate? It’s one thing to fake levitating a piece of tin foil, but that was pretty convincing!

But I was still skeptical. I started trying to think of how you could do this as the show progressed. They then interviewed a guy from a US intelligence agency. They sent a team of 6 or 8 observers up to Canada in the early 70s to do tests and observe this phenomenon (I think the LSD craze permeated into the US military back then too). Well, it didn’t work out too well, because although Hutchison claimed that things happened during these tests, they ONLY happened when the observers weren’t there.

How convenient.

Then Hutchison went on about how he was worried that the US government could be using his invention to create weapons. As he talked, I suddenly realized how he’d faked his levitation videos.

In each case, the wooden floor is NOT actually a floor, it’s just a piece of wood. The videos are taken UPSIDE DOWN. He uses an electromagnet above the piece of wood to hold the object in place, and he’s got the end of a broom stuck on there to give the illusion that it’s a floor. Then, he slowly reduces current to the electromagnet, and the object loosens and then falls. Turned upside down, it looks like the object is actually going UP, not down!

In cases like the pepsi bottle or the white liquid, it would be simple to just put metal in the base of the container and hold it in place that way (the 7-Up bottle was closed, by the way).

The show was ending, and convinced that I would find other skeptics on the Internet, I ran upstairs and looked it up on Google. Well, there’s stuff all over the place, but not really any skeptics, at least none that really talk about how he could have faked his experiments.

Then I found a site that had a different video I hadn’t seen. You can see it right at the top of the page. It looks like a metal object jumping around. Hmmm, I thought – that doesn’t fit in well with my upside-down electromagnet hoax idea. Then I read farther down the page and found this (bolded emphasis mine):

I’ve received a number of messages about the above video-links pointing out that a string is clearly visibly holding up the toy-UFO that Hutchison is experimenting with. I asked John for more information on the purpose of the string, and received the following reply:

“The string is not string but #32-gauge double polythermalized wire on a takeup up reel with 20 to 50000 volts DC. The the main apparatus was turned on, causing the toy plastic ufo to fly all about in amazing gyrations. This was a pretest to gryphon films airing this fall for fox TV. I did not need the extra high voltage 2000 time period so the toy levitated without a high voltage hook up during the filming for gryphon there was a string on the toy no high-voltage dc but interesting movements.” – John Hutchison

This is the most ridiculous explanation I’ve ever heard. Someone sees the string attached to the object, and his excuse is, “no, that’s not a string, it’s a wire?!!! Then he tacks on a pile of mumbo-jumbo to try and mask the fact that he’s bouncing the object around on a wire!

Although videos are easily faked, it would have been easy for him to make the videos a lot harder to criticize. He must have known that people would have a hard time believing that he can levitate objects using some equipment he bought at the neighbourhood surplus store, or that an aging hippie who wears cut-off jean vests has managed to leapfrog ahead of Einstein and NASA. Levitating the object while pouring a glass of water from a pitcher would have been a good demonstration. Or simply standing next to the object. Or showing the object COMING DOWN again – I found that very interesting! The videos don’t show where the objects go, and it doesn’t show them coming back down. I wonder why?

The man is obviously a total charlatan. And I am extremely unimpressed with the Discovery Channel. I realize that they are in the business of entertainment BUT they also claim to educate. Yet there was not a single skeptic or critic on the entire show!

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the defense, “it’s true, I saw it on the Discovery Channel” when people are confronted with skepticism about some bizarre claim. The Discovery Channel is BOGUS, people!

If you want to read some skeptical views on a variety of hoaxes, frauds, and outlandish claims, go to www.skepdic.com, which includes a criticism of the famous Philadelphia Experiment mentioned near the beginning of this post.

Videos

January 29, 2006 – added some videos that purport to show Hutchison Effect.

Originally written Monday, November 08, 2004

Not long ago, I was talking to my good friend Wayne about George Bush and the latest terrible events in Iraq, including the recent study estimating that since the beginning of the war 100,000 civilians have died. (The majority of the deaths, by the way, are women and children and the majority were caused by American air strikes). I believe at the time I was explaining that I’d like to create a life-size George Bush out of pumpkins and sticks in my backyard, and then invite friends over to have a few drinks and subsequently a few whacks at Mr. Bush with a hefty stick.

That was when Wayne said to me, “Ade, don’t get consumed by hate.”

As usual, he’s right. And oddly enough, that’s what started this blog. This is going to be where I whack Bush’s pumpkin head with a literary stick. In the process, I hope to tackle various other vegetables posing as world leaders, and give my opinions on a wide variety of subjects. I hope you enjoy reading them, and I hope you take the time to comment, both on what I say and how I say it. What you think is what I want to know and by listening to you I hope to learn how I can improve what I write.

The challenge we face to take this planet back from the murderous lunatics who are bent on wrecking it is enormous, but we have to do it or suffer the consequences. I hope you’ll share your thoughts and ideas about how we’re going to do it. And if at some point you can’t take it any more, drop me an email: there’s a pumpkin with an uncanny resemblance to W in my backyard waiting for us.

Originally written Monday, March 21, 2005

Terri Schiavo is a woman living in Florida through the grace of medical technology who has been at the centre of a media firestorm for the last few days. She has been in a “persistent vegetative state” (as described by her doctors) for the last 15 years, after suffering severe brain damage due to a heart attack. She has no cognitive abilities as a result and will never recover.

Her husband has been fighting her parents in court, because he wants her feeding tube to be removed and they don’t (he says it’s what she would have wanted, they seem to be victims of wishful thinking and claim that she responds to them). He has won various court battles, right up to the state Supreme Court, but now Bush and the rest of the Republicans have taken up the issue because they claim they care about her. Perhaps they do, or perhaps a leaked Republican internal memo calling it a “great political issue” that can be used to stir up the pro-life religious right is more at the heart of their “concern”.

The controversy this is generating prompted a piece in the National Post called “Learning from Terri Schiavo”, written by Peter A. Singer, who is director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics. In the piece, he recommends that people create a “living will”: instructions on what to do in situations where one is alive but is incapacitated to various degrees. You can actually download a living will template from the Centre, which contains all the information you need to create one.

I started thinking about this, and realized that there are certain things I would like to make clear in the event that I am seriously incapacitated for any reason, especially since various family members and friends could quite likely have some serious disagreements about what to do in that unfortunate event. This type of instruction is deeply personal and very private, and for that reason, I’ve decided to share it with you. Be warned that if you are upset or disturbed by frank discussions of (my) mortality this is not for you!

The template lists common medical conditions where others are called upon to make decisions about life-saving treatment. It lists mild, moderate and severe strokes; mild, moderate and severe dementia; permanent coma; terminal illness, etc. Then it lists the procedures that could be called upon to continue life: CPR, ventilator, dialysis, life-saving surgery, blood transfusion, life-saving antibiotics, tube feeding. It also outlines what living with a particular degree of illness would be.

For example, it says that if you were to have a mild stroke, you would have “mild paralysis on one side of the body. You could walk with a cane or walker. Meaningful conversations would be possible, but you might have trouble finding words.” And so on. A severe stroke means “you would have severe paralysis on one side of your body. You would be unable to walk, and would need to be in a chair or bed. You would not have meaningful conversations…you would need a feeding tube for nourishment.” Etc.

Instead of laboriously addressing each condition and each treatment, I’m going to give you the condensed version of what to do.

Anything that can be described as mild or moderate: if someone who has even half a clue looks at me and goes, “hmmm, that looks mild or moderate”, then dang it keep me plugged in! Don’t withhold my Cheerios just because I have a string of drool hanging from the left corner of my mouth. I may not be making much sense on the outside, but inside I’m swearing that if I ever get out of this high-chair I’m going to make you pay for that last head-pat and “gosh, doesn’t Adrian look darling today!”

Anything that can be described as severe: well, that all depends on what it is and on what it takes to keep me going. I’m not exactly sure why, but severe dementia does not seem like a compelling enough reason to me to say, withhold my food and water via feeding tube. After all, you don’t have any clue what’s going on inside my head – perhaps I’m floating through clouds and conversing with marigolds. Severe brain damage is another story. If I’m in a “persistent vegetative state” like Terri Schiavo for longer than a couple years or so and there’s no way I’m coming out of it, then it’s time for me to go. I want my friends and family to get on with their lives, not sit around my bed trying to find hints of communication in eye blinks or involuntary muscle twitches. In both cases, I would rather that extraordinary measures were not taken to keep me alive. Food and water is one thing, liver transplants are another – someone else could use that liver more than me, after all.

Permanent coma: According to the template, “you would be permanently unconscious…you would need to be in bed, and you would never regain consciousness.” This terminology seems slightly deceiving. It seems to me that you wouldn’t know if a coma was temporary until the person woke up, and until they do, you could claim that it was permanent. If you pull the plug too quickly, then you’d certainly be right that the coma was permanent, but I dislike that particular brand of certitude. For this reason, I respectfully request that you give me a few years to snap out of it, say five to seven years. And in the meantime, please be creative: I might wake up if you play some good beats, replace my usual water with a tasty rum & orange, spoon feed me streak (medium-rare please), etc. No, sex is not out of the question either, as necrophiliac as it may feel to you. (The word “you” is used very specifically in this last sentence, if you’re uncertain if I really mean you or not, then no, I don’t mean you. You know who you are. And aren’t.)

Terminal illness: keep me going, but please don’t drag it out. Just like you, I have to die sometime, and there’s no sense in prolonging life unreasonably. I would like to have proper and caring medical treatment but I do not expect or request exceptional treatment. And if anybody approaches you with a hare-brained scheme to, say, download my brain into a computer, or freeze me for revival in 2250 (just in case they need a decrepit, diseased North American for some reason), the answer is always yes.

After death: just because I’m already dead and can no longer influence proceedings, does not mean you can do whatever you want. Here are some quick pointers. Follow these or run the risk of haunting.

– No stuffy funeral home with worn carpets, strategically placed tissues and plastic flowers. No queues of somberly-dressed people. No obsequious funeral directors with their cans of niceties. Put me somewhere else please: someone’s house would be great, or maybe a classy establishment somewhere that has a liquor license. Perhaps inform people as they arrive that they can’t say anything just for the sake of saying it: they ought to either say something original, or just smile. Their presence is enough.
– No religion. I’m serious. No cross on the coffin, no cross on the grave. No priests, ministers, pastors, rabbis, imams, shamans or witchdoctors. No spouting a bunch of nonsense about me and where I am now (how on earth do THEY know?), where I’m going, what my life or death was supposed to mean, especially from people who don’t know me.
– Instead, a little happiness please. A little realization that this is all part of the great cycle of life. Some words from anyone who knew me that want to say something – in fact, encouragement of those people. Some drinking. In fact, a lot of drinking, if people are so inclined. Please, for safety reasons, no high kicks. If things get too stuffy, Levo is nominated to burst the bubble.

Comment from Alevo:

I still think we should stuff you. We can make your love wand particularly rigid for that special someone. If she moves on, at the very least, you’ll make a provocative coat rack. Which is more of a contribution than most can hope for in death.

Originally written Thursday, March 17, 2005

Last night, my good friend Wayne picked me up at my house and we went up to the Hamilton Gun Club, a local shooting range. Wayne has been enthusiastically telling me about how much fun he’s been having shooting trap and skeet with his two shotguns. He got his firearms license last year and bought his first gun a few months ago. I was curious to go, because I’ve never really been around guns, and I’ve never fired anything more powerful than an airgun. This was my opportunity to see what it was really all about.

The Hamilton Gun Club is a modest structure that looks like a large house, situated in a sprawling field on the outskirts of Hamilton. Colourful shotgun casings and chunks of clay litter the property. The inside of the club is utterly mundane – linoleum floors, cheerful overweight women cooking up roast beef in a large kitchen (dinner is included with the Night Shoot), and fold-up tables with a mix of Hamiltonians sitting around them. The crowd was mostly middle-aged men, with a few women shooters, and a few younger people as well, mostly in their twenties.

Wayne signed me in as a guest and we were ready to go. We went back to his truck to get the shotguns. He had already filled me in on some basic gun safety rules (the most important: don’t point the gun at anything you don’t plan to shoot), so after teaching me how to load it, use the safety, and eject the spent casings, we stuffed our pockets full of ammo and went off to shoot some trap.

Trap is where you stand behind a small concrete dugout, facing into a large field. Five people shoot at once. Each person has their own station where they fire five rounds, and then everybody rotates to the next station. You load the gun when it’s almost your turn to go, but you don’t cock it until it’s your turn and you’re ready to fire. Slamming the pump action forward and yelling “Pull!” – which is what you say when you want the operator to send out a clay, the little discs they use as targets – is a satisfying feeling. Because it’s a night shoot, they use white clays that shine brightly as they fling forwards in a long rising arc. “Snap!” I fired and missed. When you hit, the clay breaks up into a shower of fragments.

I say “snap!” to describe the sound the gun makes because that’s what it sounded like – a high-pitched pop. I had been expecting a loud boom and a significant kick, but it wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t realize that was because we were using trap-shooting rounds, which are light competition rounds designed simply to shoot clay. It wasn’t until we were shooting skeet with some younger guys, and one of them used a hunting round, that the gun really made noise – a loud “Boom!” with a big blue-white flash.

After shooting trap, we went in and ate a roast beef sandwich, prepared for us by one of the aforementioned women. A roast beef sandwich on white bread doused in gravy and some previously frozen mixed vegetables did the job of filling us up. Then we hooked up with a group of three young guys, two brothers and one of their friends, along with a girlfriend (I wasn’t quite sure whose girlfriend she was), to go shoot some skeet.

You shoot the same white clays in skeet, except that instead of flinging out from in front of you into the distance, they come from two towers on the right and left of you, and travel across your field of view instead of away from you. This is more difficult, since the lateral motion of the clay is so much greater. The other fun thing about skeet is the double rounds, where a clay is fired from each tower at about the same time. For that, you put two shells into the shotgun. “Shhh-click-load and fire, shhh-click-load and fire again!” Having to fire, then pump the shotgun and fire again immediately afterwards is a challenge. It’s exhilarating when you actually hit the second clay.

***

In my last blog post, I criticized the American military and the “justice” they apply to their soldiers. Wemi left a comment and said, “Is it hypocritical for someone to be radically against the American military/violence and then shoot guns at a range for pleasure?” [Edited].

One of the reasons I decided to go last night was to educate myself a bit more about guns, so that I could answer this type of question, and some other questions of my own. After all, guns are weapons that take thousands, maybe even millions, of lives each year. What is the connection between guns in the context I was in last night, at a shooting range, and guns used to murder, intimidate and oppress?

I think guns are what you could call a “dual-use technology”. This is a term used to describe a technology that can be used both for positive uses and negative, violent uses. Nuclear technology is a prime example: it can be used to generate power, or it can be used to create weapons of mass destruction. You could say that nuclear technology can be a tool or a weapon. Guns fall into the same two roles.

As tools, guns play an important role for many people that could hardly be replaced. In Northern Canada, guns are used as protection from dangerous animals such as bears while in the wilderness. Guns are used to hunt game, providing food for families and culling animals that are harming the ecosystem because of overpopulation (in the Hamilton area, deer that no longer have natural predators such as wolves are a prime example of that type of problem). Guns are also used in a sporting context, like at the shooting range, as a safe (safer than snowboarding, for example) and harmless hobby.

As weapons, guns also play an important role in our lives, whether we like it or not. We entrust our police officers with guarding the peace and protecting the innocent, and to do so we give them the use of deadly force. We protect our country against hostile invasion and attack with the same deadly weapons. It could be argued that if no guns existed at all, we could protect our country with bows and spears, medieval-style, although that type of thinking is pointless. Bows and spears have also taken their share of lives in their own deadly efficient way.

Being anti-war and opposed to unjust American military practices and learning how to use a gun is not a contradiction. As I’ve said, guns are tools used for various legitimate purposes in civilian life. When it comes to guns as weapons, used against people, I should point out that I am not a pacifist. I believe that violent resistance is a legitimate right against a violent oppressor. I believe that taking up arms against a hostile invader who threatens the safety of my family and friends is not just a right, it’s a duty. It’s a duty that many Canadians have answered, and died for, as they fought against the Hitler regime in World War II.

I think it is hypocritical to criticize guns used as tools to hunt game for food and for clothing, but at the same time to eat meat and wear leather. The automated violence that kills the turkeys, geese, chickens, sheep and cows that we eat every day and whose skin and feathers we use for clothes, boots, purses, pillows and cosmetics is no less a violent tool for killing than a gun. Lopping off a chicken’s head with a sharpened industrial blade is no different than lopping it off with a well-placed load of birdshot.

You could claim that by purchasing guns, you are supporting the same industry that manufactures them for the American military, where they are used unjustly, and you would probably be right. But if you feel that way, you ought to stop driving American cars, because their manufacturers also produce American tanks. You ought to stop flying on American planes, because their manufacturers also make American fighter jets. You ought to stop buying appliances made by General Electric, because they make the engines that power those fighter jets. Or you could just buy your guns from an Italian or German manufacturer and not worry about that at all.

Comment from wemi:

I understand however the personal choice of a driving a car or buying a toaster oven are not DIRECTLY contributing to the loss of so many lives, ie: gun violence that exists everwhere in the world!

Alevo:

More than anything, I think this debate illustrates the value of being an informed consumer. It is not the ownership of the item (in this case a gun) which facilitates or propogates a potentially violent application of its technology elsewhere – it is the support of a manufacturer who may contribute to activities you find unethical or problematic. Certain firearms manufacturers produce specific calibre guns which are clearly intended for taking human life, violence and intimidation. These are armour-piercing weapons, or large calibre, long-range weapons ( I say weapons here to highlight the difference – a gun is not, de facto, a weapon). Personally, I would avoid giving my money to a company that is involved in developing this form of firearm. It is a purchase decision I have the luxury of making. Wemi, for a good portion of people in the world – those who are not ensconed in the luxury of Western concrete – a gun is not a weapon. If you are familiar with our own provincial north, you will know this is the case. It is more of an issue that we ensure they are able, and want to make ethical purchasing decisions like you or I. Firearms manufacturers in the business of making weapons are big problem. Firearms manufacturers solely making safely operating, utilitarian calibre guns are not, in my opinion, contributing to gun violence.

Originally written Monday, February 28, 2005

My friends Niall and Jim and I moved in together a few years ago. It was the first time I’d lived on my own, an observation that could be made easily by anyone who noticed my tremendous lack of useful possessions: no pots, pans or kitchen appliances, no end tables or couches, no lamps or pictures. In contrast, Jim had lots of useful possessions, as well as an overwhelming abundance of junk (a retinue of belongings that follow him to this day) and a great many plants.

My bedroom had an enormous window, and Jim’s did not (an unlucky coin toss on his part), so my room became the home for several of Jim’s plants. Although I suppose he would have looked after them if I hadn’t, I was soon watering and taking care of them as though they were my own. And oddly enough, I started to develop an attachment for them.

That’s one of the first things I noticed about my relationship with plants. It was a relationship. They provided me with decoration and the illusion that I was outside, even though I was trapped indoors studying for exams or working. I provided them with water and ensured they got sunlight. They took care of my mental wellbeing, and I cared for their physical wellbeing. A relationship based on mutual trust developed.

It’s odd when you realize that you care about a plant, that you have a favourite plant, that you feel sorry for a plant that is suffering because someone else is not tending to it. While buying smokes with Wayne one Saturday night before going to the bar, I noticed a small plant languishing under the feeble fluorescent lights of the store. It looked diseased and lonely and sad, somehow, so I bought it. It had begun. I was falling in love with plants. I was becoming a herbophile.

My friend Wayne, on the other hand, is a plant sociopath. To him, a plant is a colourful piece of furniture, no more desirous of water and attention than his couch. I imagine that when Wayne walks into a nursery, plants cower into their pots like Dalmations near Cruella DeVil. His apartment is scattered with the dead and dying remains of his purchases. Those that still cling to life do so because of my infrequent visits, when I always make sure to give them some water.

That’s one of the most remarkable things about plants: their incredible tenacity. Plants cling to life like nothing else. When Wayne bought a large cactus, with two main spiny trunks rising from the soil, and parked it near his perpetually covered window, I did not expect it to live. Although cacti can make do without much water, they certainly need light, or so I thought. Somehow, it stayed alive. I would water it each time I visited. After a long period of no water (I hadn’t been by in a while), the cactus could not go on without moisture. Instead of dying, it made a sacrifice: it took all the water out of one trunk, and put it in the other. The dehydrated trunk died, but the cactus lived on, and as far as I know, it’s still alive.

The ability of plants to renew themselves, to find a way to keep going, is encouraging. When I was making dinner on an exceptionally cold day this winter, I opened the window because it was getting so hot and smoky in the kitchen. The air entering the kitchen was so cold it froze the leaves of the plants that were near the window. The leaves of the plants promptly wilted, turned brown, and fell off. Weeks later, the plants are showing finally signs of rejuvenation. Small new green leaves are appearing. Each new leaf is a visible sign that the plant will live in spite of its scars:

This plant should be taken into protective custody.

Under the right conditions, plants grow incredibly quickly. One of my favourite plants here at home was just a single stalk, six inches tall, when I gave it to Casie. A couple years later, the plant is a many-stalked five-foot tall giant of a plant, and Casie and I are married. You could say that our relationship has grown like that plant. That’s why to me, plants are a symbol of hope, determination, and life. They are a daily reminder that survival is possible even when times are tough, and that growth and vibrant life will happen when something is carefully tended to.

This is the plant I gave Casie.

Poinsettias are the plant no one waters, because they expect them to live over Christmas and that’s it. Faced with no water, this plant shed most of its leaves.

But after a regimen of Beethoven and aromotherapy, it is showing signs of recovery in the form of tiny new leaves.

One of my favourite plants, this Norfolk Pine was given to me by Casie’s grandmother “Nanny”.