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Thursday 1 October 2015

Gullibility

Gullibility is bad, it's why you believe things without evidence, such as that some guy in Nigeria has $18.700.000 and you can have it if you send him $50.

Faith, according to some people, is good, because it's belief in things without evidence, such as that if you pray, you can get whatever you want. As you can see, these two propositions can't both be true. Faith is just gullibility with a polite name.

I recently came across an example of gullibility.

"A motorcyclist has has created a motorbike powered by water, with the ability to travel as far as 310 miles on just one litre of water."

"The bike utilises a single external car battery to produce electricity to separate hydrogen from the water molecules, with the entire process resulting in combustion, which creates energy that powers Azevedo's motorbike"

Sigh.

Yes, you can convert the energy in a car battery, into separating hydrogen and oxygen, and yes you can recombine those two gases and convert the energy to motion, and yes there's no pollution in the exhaust, which is water vapour.

It sounds too good to be true. And, of course, it is.

You won't get a motorbike to travel 310 miles on the enrgy in a car battery, even if you convert that energy to hydrogen and oxygen as an intermediate step (and the intermediate step will lose some of the energy of the battery). Indeed, you'd go further if you used the car battery to power an electric motor. Which is, of course, an electric bike. I use an electric bike. You wouldn't get a tenth of the distance claimed on the energy from one car battery. I'd guess you'd be lucky to get one mile.

So what's going on here?

I'd guess there's two possibilities.

1) This is a scam against investors. Gullible people will pay to "develop the invention". Which will never work.

2) This is a scam against consumers.  Search the web, there's a lot of gizmos that let you run your car on water.


2 comments:

  1. I tried running my car on water once... It sank!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You didn't have enough faith.

    ReplyDelete