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"Stink Beam" projector
A large, hollow-ended cylinder is attached
to a bass loudspeaker. The open end of the cylinder is covered with a flat
plate, and a 3in. hole is put in this plate. This forms a vortex launcher,
and when a pulse is applied to the speaker, an invisible ring-vortex or
"smoke ring" of air will be launched. Pulses can be repetitive, so a
continuous beam of vortices is projected. Pulse waveform can be tailored
to produce robust, fast, silent vortices. Each vortex incorporates air
from within the cylinder, and carries this air along as it travels. If a
scent is placed in the cylinder, you have a "stink gun" which can target
a distant nose without being intercepted by others, or can surround a
distant object with any desired scent. If specific gases are added, then
when the "stink beam" encounters a distant source of ignition, such as a
cigarette, the vortices (and maybe the launcher device!) will explode. A
computer, video grabber, IR camera, and some stepper motors could be
assembled into an IR-seeking cigarette-targeting acetylene gasball
launcher. No Smoking!
Yucky ions
If a sharp point is attached to the dome of a VandeGraaff generator, the
point will spew charged wind. If you stand in this air stream, it will
charged your clothing and hair, which will start clinging to your body.
Ewwww!, feels like you've been dipped in vegetable oil. So, bolt a
VDG
upside-down within the ceiling, with ion-needles pointing downwards, and
a "stand here" sign on the floor below. (only works in fairly low humidity,
the lower the better.)
"Free energy" hoax
Fake device is composed of complex structures and materials, a tiny
battery-powered spark generator, and in the distance, a hidden, "stink
beam projector device" rigged for acetylene. The projector shoots gas
pulses which cause occasional loud and unexplained explosions within the
device. If both an ion projector and an acetylene launcher are used, it
may even be possible to create sparks and explosions in a
distant device which contains no power supply at all!
Even better "Free energy" hoax
Use the 'Energy
sucking receiver' effect to gather power from a special transmitter.
The receiver has an array of tuned circuits with the coils acting as loop
antennas. The transmitter has an identical array. The tuned frequencies
are scattered all over the band, and will seem like low-level white noise.
However, since the transmitter and receiver are coherent, each tuned
circuit provides significant energy, and if all of them are passed through
rectifier diodes, the total energy might be enough to run a small motor.
At the same time, the EM field of the transmitter would be almost
immesurably small.
Elvis Miracle
Use my whitelight abrasion hologram method to encode an image of
Elvis or other religious icon holographically into an everday surface,
(car hood?) Announce the miracle, charge admission, and even befuddle the
experts who come to debunk it. Impossible!, a real hologram, but encoded
into a crude painted surface!
Roadside Kilovoltage Source.
Build a sturdy VandeGraaff generator into a metal and plastic column,
with a handcrank on the top metal terminal and a large label saying
"TURN." When the crank and stepup gearing is turned, the generator
operates. Place it outdoors, and surround it with a thick plastic
insulating plate. Anyone who cranks it will feel a prickling sensation,
their hair will stand up, and the next person they touch will get a
huge "static zap." Better still: win the lottery and have thousands of
them built and distributed around the country unannounced. Permanent
Infamy!
4-Lane dot matrix printer
A truck-mounted device spits a row of
paint dots under computer control. Drive along the Interstate while
printing out political diatribes. Make our highways look like Usenet
rants. Use high-pressure water sprays instead of paint for
temporary, less illegal road gibberish. Can you be arrested for CLEANING
little spots on the highway?
Colored dyes would work well on
packed snowy roads (a little carbon copier toner or fluoroceine dye goes a
long way.) Rent out ad space in fields near airports, then do your
printing in water/seed slurry for variously colored crops. Hang a
stretched-out
version of one of these
devices as a long cable between widely-separated power boats to make an
ocean graffitti printer (On water surfaces on windy days, tiny bits of
oil make enormous blotches!)
Also: lunar dust is supposedly dark grey, so electrostatically shoot
charged
magnesium oxide (white) downwards from lunar
orbit for a more noticable and long-lasting advertising sign on the moon.
"CHAIRFACE!"
These guys independently invented the
GraffittiWriter!
Also a bike-carried chalk-spray road printer
Look at:
BikeWriter
And now here's a Graffitti machine
using winches and a single spray can. That reminds me. I first visualized
the spray-can dot matrix printer around 1978 while looking at the frat-boy
graffitti along the top edge of the huge brick chimney at the power plant
for the University of Rochester campus/hospital complex. The frat symbols
were 6ft tall, yet they appeared tiny and barely visible on the giant
chimney. I realized that the vandals were doing it wrong. Put a hundred
spray cans on a horizontal metal rod, then rapidly lower the rod with
ropes. Keep it horizontal as a computer pushes on the paint can tips with
solenoids. Make chimney-graffitti that's thirty feet across and several
hundred feet tall!
Kindergarten Solar-powered Death Squad
Take a large crowd of children out into the sunshine and give each one a
20cm square mirror. Show them how to aim all of their little spots of
sunlight at the
same distant object, then stand back and see what they do.
Better yet, run away.
FAST!
Ball-lightning incident
Ed Harris on
usa-tesla has discovered that
argon gas lets you make a large 'plasma globe' effect at ambient pressure.
Build a battery-powered Tesla Coil, clip it to your belt, and run a wire
out to an argon-filled mylar sphere. When turned on, the tip of the wire
will grow a large blazing white ball of lightning filaments. Run
screaming through the night, chased by a ball-lightning in a
hardly-noticable clear bag. Charred, smoking clothes would be good too.
Ahhhhhhg! It's biting me!
Build a Borg
The Yale psychologist
Stanley Milgram discovered what he called the "Cyrano Effect", and
experimented with strange group-organism he dubbed "Cyranoids." Build one
as follows: provide the "brain person" with a radio transmitter. Give a
radio receiver and earphone to a second or "body person," then have the
'body' agree to
carry out all orders spoken by the distant 'brain.' Even
better would be a video RF link so the 'brain' can see and hear through
the 'body's' eyes, and maybe add a radio channel which controls vibrating
transducers on the 'body' person, so that the 'brain' can silently command
their movements with a joystick rather than verbally. If one 'brain' runs
several 'bodies,' you've got the start of a small Borg civilization! If
you could rent the equipment for cocktail parties, would you pay more to
be an amoral central controller, or a brainless puppet who might do
ANYTHING?
The same psychologist discovered the power of this closed causality loop
common in World War II:
- NOT MY FAULT, ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS.
- ONLY GAVE ORDERS, DID NOTHING MYSELF.
This can be used to convert a pair of people into a psychopath.
Responsibility for actions becomes a closed loop and evaporates. Ordinary
"good" people can be convinced to give lethal shocks if a superior
authority figure gives the orders and SEEMS to take responsibility. If
anything bad happens, both people are certain it was the OTHER person's
fault. As a consequence, the radio-controlled 'Cyranoid' pair is very
dangerous.
So David Letterman has built himself one? Just wait until Dave gives an
unwise order to his puppet and finds that the person ACTUALLY CARRIES IT
OUT! The 'slave' trusts the 'master' to give only benign orders and stops
thinking, but the 'master' may order something terrible, just to see how
far the 'slave' will go. When Letterman's slave commits a crime, whose
fault will it be, the one who only followed orders, or the one who did
nothing himself?
Phaser Weapon
If pure argon is injected into a laminar stream of air, the argon stream
will support sparks of enormous length. If connected to a fair-sized
Tesla coil, the argon stream should produce linear arcs many feet long.
This would be easily disrupted by wind or by a small fan. Indoors use only?
Reach out zap someone! A similar effect can be had by running an
argon stream through a hose connected to a distant tesla coil.
Hot dangerous arc-plasma will pour from the hose end. "Don't unplug
that rubber hose, its not full of water!" Fill a bowl with cold argon,
place a tesla coil underneath, then stick your hand in the bowl.
Lightning shoots out of your fingertips. Fill an entire
small room with Argon or even Neon. Hook yourself to a small tesla coil
and enter the room, and you'll look like something inside an "Eye
of the Storm" plasma globe. (Hold your breath, of course!)
Longrange Defacement Ray
CO2 lasers of hundreds of watts rating are very small and not that
expensive. With a large-diameter beam and the proper collimator you could
create a "woodburner" which leaves a charred black mark several hundred
feet away. Mount it in an old rusty van along with computer and XY scan
mirrors (might have to install pneumatic jacks to keep the van steady.)
Drive to a spot with a clear view, use your joystick to set the anamorphed
position of your artwork on yon billboard, then hit the return key and
slooooowly the original propaganda is modified or replaced by that of your
own design.
Duck-plunge Mechanical Fountain
When a large rock is flung into a pond, the waves spread into a series of
ripples of descending wavelength, as if the water has "Fourier
Transformed" the splash signal. It has! The water surface is not a
linear medium, therefore any signal becomes "chirped" in a similar way to
the "whistlers" produced in ELF radio sets by distant lightning pulses.
If you could wiggle an underwater object and produce an "antichirp"
series of ripples, (a temporally-reversed version of the ripples from a
big splash,) then as the ripples moved, they would slowly compress
together and finally create a line or circle with a little explosion of
spray.
Ripples also take the form of an expanding circle. Rather than just
reversing the "chirp", we could also reverse their direction.
If water ripples could be created as inwards-curving rings, so that they
focussed themselves to a point, so much the better.
Therefore build a bicycle-powered wave generator which can be placed at
the
shore of a pond. It would slowly vibrate a long, curved wall which floats
half-immersed in the water. When aimed at a distant unwary duck, a series
of ripples is created. The duck sees the distant ripples approaching, and
contracting, and concentrating, then... DOOOSH! WAAAK-Aaak quaaak
quackquack...
Or build the device onto a large fountain pool. Design the wave-generator
to produce several superimposed "antichirp" patterns per revolution of the
flywheel. Then, if you pedal at the right speed, a mysterious zone of
violent splashing would appear out in the middle of the pool. Do
this in a lake by using a very long, very weak wave generator. The
waves would remain invisible except at the focus which was hundreds of
feet away from the wiggling boards.
RATS, SOMEONE
BEAT ME TO IT
Suppose the wave-generator was adjusted to produce a *line* of splashing,
and every so often the antichirp waves would contract and produce a long
burst of "chop". This line might act to reflect other water waves,
especially if the event was repeating at the same frequency as the waves.
Perhaps we could trap a standing wave in the space between the shore and a
nonlinear barrier made from "chop." Or design the wave generator to
create a square *hole* in the water temporarily. Make a really big one,
so all the small 3rd-world countries can tickle the ocean for awhile and
have it swallow approaching aircraft carriers.
Soliton waves can exist on the surface of water. The "tidal bore" is one
such soliton wave. Perhaps a soliton can be assembled from many smaller
waves. (This probably occurs in nature, where freak waves sink large
ships.) If freak waves can exist, then cranking a bicycle-powered wave
generator for a couple of minutes could create the smaller waves which
contract together, then sum nonlinearly to build a gigantic travelling
soliton. Very cool museum exhibit!
Hidden images on videotape This one isn't so useful. A cool
trick for techies? If you view a television signal on an oscilloscope,
you see a froth of squiggly shapes. Also, as objects move around on the
TV screen, the squiggly shapes on the oscilloscope move and flow. Suppose
you write software that changes the TV signal so the reverse happens?
Then the television picture will be a mass of wavy moving shapes. But if
you observe that video signal using an oscilloscope, the signal will
contain a perfectly clear television picture.
DOH! The musician Aphex Twin figured out a use for this. But don't apply
it to TV signals and scopes. Instead apply it to sound and spectrum
analyzers! That way you'll get weird swervy noise, but when the noise is
viewed with a spectrum analyzer, you'll see some clear images. The
results were recently posted on memepool, see usefulcontent
and cleth
pages.
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