Hoax Museum Blog: Technology

Man Builds Robot Version of Himself — Wired has an interesting article about Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese researcher who has built a remote-control robotic version of himself: Ishiguro says that he built the robot so that he could "robot in" to his classes instead of having to endure a long commute. During college I actually had a recurring fantasy about doing exactly this, since I would routinely oversleep and miss classes. So I imagine in the future, if Ishiguro's idea becomes popular, there could be entire classes filled entirely with remote-control robots. Though if everyone in the classroom were a robot, it would kind of defeat the purpose. You might as well just have a tele-conference. (Thanks, Kathy!)

In-Car Phonographs — Did car manufacturers ever offer the option of an in-car phonograph? I would have thought not. After all, the technological challenge presented by such a product is obvious. How can you get it not to skip? But trusting in the common sense of car manufacturers is never a wise thing to do. So in this respect it's probably obvious that, yes, such a feature was once offered, though for a very brief period of time. Predictably, the in-car phonographs skipped like crazy and were pulled from the market.

Ookworld.com offers a history of the Highway Hi-Fi. They debuted in 1956 as an option in some Chrysler models. The big catch was that they only played records specially made for in-car phonographs: 7-inch 16⅔-rpm ultra-microgroove format records. There were only six discs in this format to choose from. Those discs contained a selection of "classical recording, the tops in popular music, drama, children's stories" selected by Columbia Records executives.

Chrysler didn't offer this style of in-car phonograph again. But in 1960 it did offer a unit that played regular 45-rpm records. You could stack up 12 of them at a time. It worked well if you were sitting in your car idling. As soon as the car started to move, there were problems.

The UAW-Daimler-Chrysler site also offers a shorter history of the in-car phonograph, with color pictures.

Scandinavian Model Alexandra Ansgar Promotes Firefox — LaMa gave me a heads up about a hoax circulating through the open source community. I'll let him describe it in his own words:

"How do you hoax the geeks behind the open Source movement and the ICT web press? Yep: with a hot blonde and some photoshop...

All over the geek Blogging world, posts started to appear last week that the Mozilla Foundation, the guys behind amongst others the increasingly popular Open Source webbrowser Firefox and e-mail client Thunderbird, had struck a deal with hot blonde Scandinavian photo model Alexandra Ansgar to promote their product Firefox (just Google her name and you'll get plenty of hits). The news items were accompanied by a picture where this Alexandra posed in a seductive top printed with the Firefox logo (attached).



But it was a hoax. The photo [left] is a photoshopped version of the second attached picture [right].

In fact "Scandinavian top model Alexandra Ansgar" does not exist at all. The name is made up, it is the name of a Hotel in Copenhagen. The picture of the blonde is lifted from a softporn site, www.emy18.com.

Apparently the photoshopped picture emerged on April 29th as a geeky joke, not a hoax attempt, on a Portuguese language weblog:
http://kaylee.weblog.com.pt/

From there, the picture was taken over by a few other bloggers.

It then seems that on June 11th, www.gadgetizer.com elaborated the picture into a hoax, inventing "Scandinavian model Alexandra Ansgar" and the story about the deal with the Mozilla Foundation:
http://www.gadgetizer.com/2006/06/11/new-firefox-mascot-alexandra-ansgar/

From there, it spread over the internet, the story being taken for real and cvered by a number of Geek/ICT sites (you'll find enough of them when you Google "Alexandra Ansgar").

- Marco ("LaMa")

Alexandra Ansgar kind of reminds me of the Dusty girl.

Genpets (shrinkwrapped pets) — Meet Genpets, the cute, cuddly (kind of ugly) pets of the future, that come shrinkwrapped in plastic: It should be pretty obvious that Genpets aren't real, though the Genpets site is well designed. The Genpets site is the creation of artist Adam Brandejs. Apparently he's actually been hanging these things in store windows. And the real-life versions of them look like they're alive, thanks to some robotics and circuitry. He writes: (Thanks to Torbjørn Solstad for the link)

SmackBook — A video on YouTube shows a MacBook Pro that has supposedly been hacked to rapidly change applications whenever it's smacked on the side. (Thanks to Kathy for sending the link.) I have to admit that when I first saw it, I thought it was fake. I figured the guy was probably pushing a button to make the applications change. However, after reading Erling Ellingsen's description on Medallia blog of how the SmackBook was created, I'm now pretty sure it's real. He writes: More importantly, he also provides the code so that anyone else can hack the Mac's built-in motion sensor and create a SmackBook, if they desire. And a few people have reported successfully replicating the SmackBook. It's a cool little trick, but I don't see it having that many practical applications.

Cordless Jump Rope — The U.S. Patent Office recently awarded patent number 7037243 to Lester Clancy, inventor of the cordless jump rope. It's a jump rope without the rope. I guess you could call it an 'air rope'. However, it does have handles. Here's the description from the patent: Clancy's logic for inventing this is that if there's no rope, there's nothing to trip over. Which makes sense. Of course, learning how to avoid tripping on the rope is part of the challenge of jumping rope... what makes it fun. Jumping up and down with weights is great exercise, but for that you're better off using a pair of dumbbells. More info about this at Patently Silly. (submitted by Beverley)

Adult-Proof Ringtones — I've received quite a few emails about this. A British paper, metro.co.uk, reports that resourceful teenagers have devised a way to make the ringing of their cellphones inaudible to adults. The trick is that they've recorded the sound of the Mosquito, which is a device that emits ultrasonic tones inaudible to most people over the age of twenty-five, but quite audible, and rather annoying, to people under the age of 25:

Techno-savvy pupils have adapted the Mosquito alarm, used to drive teenage gangs away from shopping centres. They can receive calls and texts during lessons without teachers having the faintest idea what is going on. The alarm, which has been praised by police, is highly effective because its ultra-high sound can be heard only by youths but not by most people over 20. Schoolchildren have recorded the sound, which they named Teen Buzz, and spread it from phone to phone via text messages and Bluetooth technology. Now they can receive calls and texts during lessons without teachers having the faintest idea what is going on.

Can this be real? Well, the Mosquito is real enough (I posted about it back in November 2005), and it is true that young people can usually hear higher frequencies than older people because we lose the ability to hear high frequencies as we age. The question is whether cellphone speakers can generate these ultrasonic frequencies. Boing Boing posts a comment from one of their readers who swears that cellphone speakers would not be able to do this. However, another reader links to an article that contains an mp3 recording of the Mosquito sound. (When I listen to it I can't hear any high-pitched noise, just a bunch of street noise.) So if computer speakers can generate these frequencies, perhaps some high-end cellphone speakers also can. Seems plausible. In other words, I'm not yet willing to label this story as a hoax or false rumor, even though it does seem to be a bit far-fetched.

The Million Dollar Space Pen — Dwayne Day has an interesting article in Space Review about the urban legend of the Million Dollar Space Pen. I'm sure you've heard the legend before. It's the one in which NASA pays a million dollars to develop a pen that will write in space. The Russians, meanwhile, being a bit more practical and budget-conscious, just use a pencil for their space missions.

The truth is that the space pen was independently developed in the mid-1960s by Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company. He did it completely on his own, without prompting by NASA and without NASA money. It turned out to be a good pen, and NASA later started to use it. But they paid around $2 a piece for them. Not $1 million. Day notes that:

"The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe."

I know that you can still buy space pens. I saw them for sale a few months ago at Restoration Hardware.

Real-Life JATO Car — The JATO (jet-assisted take-off) car is one of the most famous urban legends of all time. (Man attaches JATO unit to the top of his Chevy Impala, fires it up on a deserted Arizona highway, and launches himself into a nearby cliff at 300 mph.) But the San Francisco Chronicle reports about a man, Ron Patrick, who has built a real-life JATO car. It's a silver Volkswagen with a huge jet engine sticking out the back. It's very cool. I want one. Patrick gave this description of turning on the jet engine while driving:

"You drive the car up to about 90 miles an hour and you spool up the jet, then hit it W.O.T. (wide-open throttle)," he said, fondly recalling one of his rides. "It's one of the finest feelings you can have in your life. In the rear view mirror, all you see is light and hear the thunder of the jet. It's like you're going down the largest hill you've ever been on." He said that a jet-boosted run will "pin the speedometer and that's at 140." He thinks that when it hits 160 mph -- he hasn't seen that ... yet -- the car will start lifting off the ground, but "the fun is not necessarily how fast you want to go. The fun is the sound of the thing. Just starting it up, it's like a (Boeing) 747 landing in your front yard."

Is Nintendo Wii A Hoax? — Last week Nintendo announced that it was renaming its soon-to-be-released console. The former name was Revolution. The new name? Wii. Barely had the name passed Nintendo's lips, than the snickering and outrage from the gaming community began. As one person astutely put it, "It means piss. For god's sake, it means PISS!" (It also means little in Scottish, but no one seems as upset about that.)

Does Nintendo hope to generate publicity by gaving the console such an odd name? Or is this a case of a Japanese company not having realized what the name of its product meant in translation? Or is this all an elaborate hoax staged by Nintendo?

Those who think it might be a hoax point out that there are no trademarks registered by Nintendo for Wii. However, Nintendo has responded that it has, in fact, registered the name, but it takes a while for trademark web sites to update.

Nintendo explains that the name is supposed to emphasize the communal, multi-player nature of the console. The two i's in the name are supposed to look like two players. My hunch is that Nintendo is perfectly serious about this and that the name isn't a hoax. But we'll know for sure when the product is officially launched at the upcoming E3 convention.

Chapstick Lets You Cheat on Scantron Tests — Here's an odd urban legend that I just stumbled across. Supposedly if you smear chapstick down the side of a scantron sheet (the kind used for standardized tests such as the SAT), the grading machine will mark all your answers correct. The theory is that the chapstick will interfere with the scanning light, confusing it into thinking that your answers are correct. Needless to say, this doesn't work.

Some guy named Richard Mangahas has written a short article detailing all kinds of theories about ways to cheat on scantron tests, including: marking or deleting the black lines along the side of the page, filling in the bubbles with cross-hatches, or placing tape along the side of the page. I don't think any of these methods would work either. (Though Mangahas claims some of them work 25-30% of the time... which is about the same percentage you would expect from guessing at the right answer.)

Maybe it was kids armed with chapstick that caused all those SAT-test score errors recently.

Plane With Flapping Wings — I'm no aeronautical engineer, so I'm not qualified to say if the plane featured on the website of JCR Technology could fly or not, though it sure doesn't look to me like it would ever get off the ground. Apparently it's supposed to fly by means of eight flapping wings, located on either side of the plane. The website is entirely in French, so I can't determine if this is simply some kind of thought experiment, or a real plane that someone is trying to build. Definitely check out the computer-graphic simulations of the plane flying (look under the 'images' tab). Even in the simulations, it doesn't look like it could fly. There's a photostream on Flickr showing a crosssection of this plane being displayed at the Salon International des Inventions in Geneva, which seems to be a convention for people with crazy inventions.

‘Devil Calls’ Cause Exploding Phones — Panic has struck mobile phone users in India as word spreads of "devil calls" that cause your phone to explode: "People started turning off their handsets after a rumour swept Orissa state of phones exploding like bombs killing their owners when they answered the calls. The random "devil calls" supposedly started Sunday from phones with 11 to 14 digit numbers instead of the regular 10, said an official from India's state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam phone company."

Obviously the rumor is completely bogus, but the theory of the general manager of the phone company in the area is interesting. He speculates that the 'devil call' rumor "could be the handiwork of vested interests to subsequently market anti-virus software for mobile phones." Sounds plausible. (I've never used anti-virus software because it seems to cause more computer problems than viruses themselves do... though I use a Mac, so viruses aren't a big issue.)

I also recall that almost the exact same rumor swept through Nigeria back in July 2004. Somehow it travelled from Nigeria to India.

Real Discoveries Dismissed as Hoaxes — A few days ago the Financial Times ran a brief list of major technological breakthroughs that were either ignored or ridiculed. This raises an interesting issue: the danger of over-skepticism, or dismissing startling new discoveries as hoaxes simply because one refuses to believe that anything new or out-of-the-ordinary can be real. I can't find a link to the FT story, but here's a summary of their list:

The Wright Brothers' discovery of flight: "When two American bicycle repairmen claimed to have built the world's firstaircraft in 1903, they were dismissed as cranks. Newspapers refused to send reporters or photographers to witness any of the flights. More than two years later, Scientific American magazine was still insisting that the story was a hoax. By that time, the Wright brothers had completed a half-hour flight covering 24 miles."

Steam Turbine Propulsion: "The claim of Irish engineer Charles Parsons to have developed a radically new form of marine propulsion was scorned by the Admiralty, until his steam turbine vessel made an unauthorised appearance at the 1897 Spithead naval review going at 37 knots - faster than any other vessel in the fleet."

Atoms as a source of energy: "The idea that atoms could be a source of energy millions of times more potent than coal or oil was dismissed by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford as "moonshine"."

Amorphous semiconductor materials: "During the 1950s, self-taught American physicist Stanford Ovshinsky found a way of creating materials lacking a regular crystal structure - an achievement dismissed as impossible by scientists. They are now standard components in devices ranging from flat-panel displays to solar cells."

Lasers: "While developing the technology behind the laser, American physicist Charles Townes was approached by two Nobel-Prize-winning colleagues who told him he was wasting his time and threatening their funding. Even after the first laser was built in 1960, it was described as "a solution looking for a problem"."

The Scanning Tunnelling Microscope: "The Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), invented by scientists at IBM in Zurich in the early 1980s, now plays a key role in fields ranging from biology to nanotechnology. But many scientists remained deeply suspicious of the claims made for the STM until its inventors won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1986."

To this list I can add:

Photography: Marcus Aurelius Root, a 19th century American photographer, recorded that: "In 1839, and on the very day of the publication of Daguerre's discovery in the Philadelphia daily papers, Dr. Bird, then chemical professor in one of our medical schools, was asked, at a gathering of several scientific men, what he thought of this new method of copying objects with the sunbeam? The Doctor, in a lengthened reply, pronounced the whole report a fabrication--a new edition of the famed "moon-hoax"--such a performance being, in his view, an intrinsic improbability."

The Duckbilled Platypus. When George Shaw, keeper of the Department of Natural History at the British Museum, examined a specimen of a duckbilled platypus sent to him from Australia, he wrote that, "it is impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure."

Of course, all these real discoveries that were regarded as hoaxes provide an endless source of encouragement to all the crackpots who are convinced that their devices for extracting infinite energy from magnets, or using water as a fuel, are similarly misunderstood.

Video iPod — In the past two weeks there have been a flurry of rumors, accompanied by pictures, about new products from Apple. We've seen this version of a new video iPod:


It turned out to be a hoax created by "Bud62". A picture of an Apple iPhone has also been floating around:


This iPhone is a fantasy product designed by Isamu Sanada (who's just a guy who likes to design fictitious Apple products). And finally, we have another video iPod:


Yet another hoax. Whoever created it has placed a video online showing the entire process they went through to photoshop the image. It's a pretty interesting (and amusing) video. You get to watch a hoaxer at work.

Ancient Pottery Recorded Audio — The Raw Feed has linked to a video (in French) in which Belgian archaeologists discuss how they were able to "use computer scans of the grooves in 6,500-year-old pottery to extract sounds -- including talking and laughter -- made by the vibrations of the tools used to make the pottery." The video is fairly good quality and would lead you to believe that it might be real, if it weren't for the premise being pretty farfetched (and not reported anywhere else in the news). Make Magazine reports that the video was created last year as an April Fool's Day hoax, and point out that "This site - 'Poisson d'avril de journal televise', translates to: 'April fools newscast'." (However, I can't find any mention of Poisson d'avril in the site they link to.) Other Make readers point out that the premise (audio extracted from ancient pottery) was ripped off (pun intentional) from a story by Gregory Benford, Time Shards. (Thanks to Schmawy for the link)

How To Cook An Egg With Two Cell Phones — No, it's not possible to cook an egg with two cell phones. At least, not by using the method outlined on wymsey.co.uk. The instructions basically boil down to this: place an egg between two phones, use one phone to call the other, and then wait for radio signals to cook the egg. Wymsey notes that cooking time:

very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

As I said, this method definitely won't work (though I wouldn't rule out there being some kind of MacGyver way to cook an egg involving highly polished cellphones and reflected sunlight). What should be noted, however, is that Wymsey never intended anyone to believe it would work. The instructions are a joke. A lot of sites (including, surprisingly, Boing Boing) don't seem to have realized this. (Isn't the name Wymsey a giveaway?) The Wymsey site (which chronicles the goings-on in the fictional village of Wymsey) was created by Charlie Ivermee back in 1998, and he wrote the egg article in 2000. In an interview with Gelf Magazine he explains why he wrote the article:

“It was 6 years ago but I seem to recall that there was a lot of concern about people's brains getting fried and being from a radio/electronics background I found it all rather silly. So I thought I'd add to the silliness.”

magicSHELF Mystery Solved — Greg Cason broke down and ordered one of those LinkyDinky magicSHELVES that I posted about last week (I was tempted to do the same), thereby learning the secret of how they work. It turns out it's not a photoshop trick, nor are the books glued to the wall. Actually, they work almost exactly as I theorized. [edited out... I can't give away the secret. That would be against the magician's creed: never give away the trick!]

Update: Uncle Url himself (of Linky Dinky) sent me an email in response to the Museum of Hoaxes's ongoing magicSHELF investigation. Here's how it begins:

Alex -- You spilled my beans!
Well, all I've got to say is that I'm glad you concluded the story by allowing that our MagicShelf is, in fact, a "real" product and that it does exactly what it says it does. However... don't think so fast that the parts can be had at any local hardware store for 3 or 4 dollars.

For the full email click here. (It was a bit too long to post in its entirety on the front page.) Well, I hope Uncle Url doesn't harbor any bad feelings towards me for revealing the secret of the magicSHELF. It would kind of suck to get on Linky Dinky's blacklist. (There are many people whose blacklist I would be proud to be on, but I actually like Linky Dinky. They did come up with the Lovenstein Institute, after all.) But what can I say? The mystery of the magicSHELF was too tempting a puzzle not to try and solve. Anyway, I'm sure there are many products that can be constructed by do-it-yourselfers for a fraction of the cost, but since most of us aren't do-it-yourselfers, I doubt the market for the magicSHELF will be threatened by people buying the parts at the hardware store and making their own. Actually, I'm still tempted to buy one, since it would be an interesting conversation piece to have in my office.

Flying Car on Google Earth — The Register has found what appears to be a flying car, captured by the satellite imagery of Google Earth. It's definitely either a flying car, a car parked alongside a dark-looking patch on the ground, a car-shaped object floating in the air... or maybe a UFO! The Register provides some screenshots of the object, but unfortunately no direct link. (Google Maps doesn't cover Australia, so you'll need the Google Earth program to see it). The mysterious object is located at Pt. Walter in Perth, Australia.

Seven-Person Bicycle — Odd, but real. Hammacher Schlemmer is selling a seven-person bicycle. (Actually, bicycle is inaccurate. It's a tricycle.) The blurb about it says: "The frame has an ergonomic design making it easy to get on and off, and has seven sets of pedals that propel the trike forward via a patented transmission system. One person steers, while all seven riders are free to pedal, or not, as the bike moves along." You'd look real cool going down to the store to pick up a loaf of bread on this thing, especially if you then try to chain it up in the bike rack. (Thanks to Daniel Folk for the link.)