All these super mileage devices are popular urban myths. Supposedly the automakers and Big Oil won’t allow them to come to market because they’d wreck the industry. As if the auto companies really care what happens to the oil companies. The people who tell you this are usually conspiracy mavens who offer it as an example of how the masses are duped by the Illuminati or some other big bad entity. you do have to be skeptical. Right now oil companies are regarded very lowly by the general public with BP screwing up the Gulf and all. With that the conspiracy theorist has a perfect boogie man to use to sell their scams to a gullible public. It’s far easier to blame a faceless daemon than really study the issue with a critical eye. And lets face it, it is a complex technological issue that to understand requires an understanding of things like Thermodynamics and energy conservation. If you do not understand the technical issues than you can be sold the idea that some extraordinary device can take a car that gets 30MPG and by installing it make the same car get 200MPG. AND here is the most ridiculous part…. the conspiracy theorist sell the idea that auto companies would not use this technology simply because the oil companies or the government said not to. Fact is the auto companies are hurting right now and you bet your life GM would use it, if not they know Ford would, and if not Ford, Toyota or Honda. Something like a 200MPG device could never be suppressed, the value would be far to great. Government could not stop it, what are they going to do, take an auto maker to court for making something a majority of the public wants? The reason you do not see such devices is the simple fact ‘They do NOT work”, no one has been able to make it work or demonstrate it is even feasible.

The internal combustion engine does a good job of burning the fuel you put into it, and there is little you can do to the fuel to make that better. It’s just the thermal efficiency of an internal combustion engine is not very good, much of the energy produced is not used to propel the car, it’s lost as heat energy. Just feel the hood of your car or the radiator, all that heat is just being pumped into the air. Things like turbo chargers can take some of that heat and use it to compress the fuel air mixture for more power and improved mileage but it’s small.

Real high mileage is never the result of a single miraculous component, such as a carburetor. Carburetors in general are an obsolete technology now being replaced by computer controlled electronic fuel injection, which offers superior emission control and better gas mileage. Truth is carbs are the equivalent of the buggy whip. Getting high mileage is sum of numerous small improvements. Among these are lightweight materials, small light car require less energy to move, low-friction tires, improved aerodynamics, flywheels to store and reuse energy now lost during braking, and “ultra-lean-burn” engines for more efficient city driving. The theoretical (and yet unobtainable) maximum efficiency for a small car like a Honda Civic could be around 200 mpg, BUT, for your big beaters it’s going to be much lower. This won’t come from “blue-collar ingenuity”, some backyard mechanic with a magical carburetor. Claims to the contrary are fraudulent. Want to get 200MPG, you will need a very small car, maybe only two seater, very light with maybe a small turbo charged diesel engine, and, no Carburetor. The reason you don’t see these cars is not because of a giant conspiracy but because the American public won’t buy these cars, they still want SUVs and pick-up trucks.

Tell me all you UFO believers. If these things are being flown by intelligent beings and I assume they do not want to be seen, WHY fly with the lights on? Doesn’t sound very intelligent to me. Hell even us lowly humans can fly around without being seen, Rule number one for NOT being seen, TURN OFF YOUR LIGHTS!  Sound more like an unintelligent phenomena being misinterpreted by people who desperately want it to be aliens. Stories of close or not so close encounters sound far more exciting than saying you got drunk and saw a light in the sky, got all excited but it turned out to be a low flying helicopter or the planet Venus.

Now, If their intension is to be seen why only fly around at night and take efforts to avoid being seen. Why not fly right over Cleveland with a big banner “We Come In Peace”. If they want to tell us something important about world peace or the environment why tell it to some drunk hillbilly, old stoner or woman living in a trailer park, give your big important message to someone who is respected and know for being “non-crazy”. And for gods sake what is with the anal probe thing? And how about this thing with having sex with sad lonely and often ugly women?

This is what is called Critical Thinking. If it sounds like BS, it most likely is BS.

Some of you may remember the sightings of UFOs over Morristown, N.J. earlier this year, it to was captured on video that has been posted to YouTube. And I bet still being used as proof of alien visitors. It turned out to be simply two guys attaching road flairs to balloons. They did it to prove a point, so called “Experts” said they could not explain the light and their movements implying it could only be aliens. The news media made a big point of interviewing a professional pilot who saw the light and recognized they were not airplanes, well yeah, there were flairs tied to balloons.

So imaging getting some cheap bright flashing LED lights and a few good size balloons, instant UFOs. I would bet money a hoax is more likely than aliens pilots.

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Unfortunately debunkers soon pointed out the science journal in question was Bentham Open Journals, a for all intents and purposes a vanity publisher. You pay, they publish. Not exactly a REAL peer reviewed publisher of hard core science information. This did little to get the tin foil hat wearing conspiracy huckster taken seriously by scientist who know what they are talking about.

The dubious quality of Bentham’s peer review process has been brought into clear focus by a graduate student at Cornell University. They got a paper accepted by Bentham that consisted of nothing but computer generated nonsense.

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].

The writers of the paper even dropped a hint of the hoax by giving their institutional affiliation as the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, or CRAP.

CRAP paper accepted by journal – opinion – 11 June 2009 – New Scientist.

This is not the first time “pay-to-play” journals have been had. The Cornell students withdrew the hoax paper, Why? Because they are students, and Bentham wants $800 to publish.

The 9/11 Truth movement dies a slow but humorous death but does provide a good laugh from time to time.

FBI agents investigating a February 15 bomb hoax that evacuated the mechanical engineering building at Purdue University traced the phone call to the juvenile’s Oxford, North Carolina home. They served his mother with a search warrant and arrested the teen. He does have an attorney and will get his day in court.

The claim that the boy is a victim of USA PATRIOT, though, appears to have been cut from whole cloth. While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial. It’s also not responsible for making it illegal to phone in a bomb threat. That’s been a federal crime since 1939.

Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Blogs and talk radio on the left and right have been howling over the original rumor, but strangely quiet now that the story is proving to be over hyped fear mongering. These so called news sources play to the popular conspiratorial viewpoint, people eat up claims of big bad evil men taking away your rights but suddenly become deaf to the real story.

This is one of those stories that when I first heard it set off my bullshit detector. It didn’t sound right, and sure enough the truth is far less ominous than the ballyhoo.

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