I recently heard bits and pieces of science about the Helvetica effect. I think the gist of it is that if you mess around with the molecular compostion of calcium, you can either generate incredible explosive power, or create a substance that can also alter other molecular compounds of certain things (such as melting people’s bones inside them).
I also heard that the U.S. government did some research into weaponizing this, but realized it was too unstable to be worthwhile, and furthermore that the USA PATRIOT act required pretty much all the major search engines to delete this information from their databases (if you do a search on google you only get fonts).
Any history or chemistry dopers know any more about this? Or is this just one of those Tesla-style conspiracy theories?
I’m a Chemical Engineer, and “I ain’t never heard of no such thing”. Seriously, I did a Google search on helvetica, calcium, and effect, and the only hits have something to do with the helvetica font or with some Chemical journals (like Helvetica Chimica Acta). Are you sure it was “Helvetica effect”? The rest of what you mention (for instance melting people’s bones inside them) sounds like 100% baloney! In other words, another Tesla-style conspiracy theory.
It’s not that this is total impossible a-scientific bunk. It’s that the government has managed to reach down to every search engine in the world to erase the info!
Thanks everyone. I pretty much came to the “shenanigans” conclusion too. But it was fun to hear about, in the “OMG the FBI has the secret of Tesla’s death ray locked in a vault!” kind of way.
I think I have nailed down the source of this little story. It apparently (although I’m not 100% sure) comes from a BCC TV series called “Look Around You”, which is a parody of those filmstrips and videos you would watch in grade school to learn about science stuff.
“molecular compostion” - Am I the only one who thinks “nanometer-sized earthworms” here?
Anyway, it sounds like a mixture of sales brochures for quack water softeners, Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine, and a Harry Potter book.
There are such things as hydrofluoric acid, which upon skin contact diffuses through the body and bonds mainly to the bone calcium. In high concentrations it causes liquefaction necrosis of soft tissue (I guess that looks like it sounds) and chemical corrosion of the bones.
If you’re lucky though, your exposure was low enough that you ‘only’ die a few hours later of hypocalcemia, nerve damage, cardiac arrest, and clogged kidneys.
So what? China blocked access to Google, for one. You don’t have to alter all outside sources if you only allow filtered access to government approved sites in the first place. Even in the land of free speech Scientology sued critics out of the search results, for another.
Whether this can work is another question, but governments or lobbyists that more or less successfully try to stifle unwanted internet content are far from being just a conspiracy theory.
I think you have your tinfoil hat screwed on a little too tightly.
You cannot jump from China blocking one search engine to a non-totalitarian government removing information from every search engine in the world in any rational leap.
Nor is an organization suing on copyright grounds anywhere near the equivalent either. Asking that pirated copyright material be removed happens every single day, and is an enforcement of freedom rather than an infringement of it. This is true regardless of your opinion (or mine) of Scientology.
People who spread conspiracy theory nonsense (not the OP, who was legitimately asking for info) rely on the credulous extrapolating the real world into paranoia. The SDMB should be devoted to fighting that notion rather than supporting it.
Sadly I was beat to the punch about the Hydrofluoric acid, which I get to work with on a daily basis (it dissolves glass, so store it in plastic containers). Calcium as a metal is somewhat reactive but it’s nigh impossible to convert the Ca in one’s body to a condensed strip of metal.
Of course it’s bunk. My point was merely to show that control of the outside data isn’t necessary if you control the information infrastructure. And that it actually isn’t a conspiracy theory to assume that some people do in fact have power over others to effectively ‘remove’ information from their world.
Certainly not in the U.S. (yet), but that’s where the whole story might come from. Search engines, as an essential part of this information infrastructure, are a worthy target if you want to control the world (which of course is the ultimate goal of all governments and ‘religions’). Add some generic bunk science, spice it up with the “perfect conspiracy”, and voilà, a good story that spreads by itself, with a moral that if you let pass too many new laws unquestioned you’ll end up with a government that has the power to erase information.
“Helvetica Scenario”. It’s the first thing I though of when I ckicked I on this thread. I’m pretty sure the series made it up. Pretty funny series, by the way.
If anything, it’s the first parenthesis that might reflect my true political concern. The second one was just to thread the yarn. All I said was that political pressure requiring to remove information from public view is not as universally laughable or technically impossible as it appears to be upon reading the OP scenario. Who put the tinfoil hat on me anyway?
A. The rumor in the OP is true and it is possible in the U.S. to alter information at the magnitude that is suggested.
B. It is possible to reach down to every search engine in the world to erase the info.
C. It is impossible within any existing or conceivable government to reach down to every search engine on the accessible net to effectively erase the info.
Now, B is complete bollocks and we agree on this. Your line of argument is that therefore A can’t be true either and we still and completely agree on this.
I was pointing out that the logic does not hold in those cases (and only in those cases) where B is superseded by C, should anybody read your post as if it universally and directly followed from the impossibility of B that rumors like the OP are nothing but the perfect conspiracy theory.
Nothing more, no statement about A or B. I’m on your side, really. That I didn’t take the bait and said the moon landing was a hoax should prove it.
You did by claiming that “all” (universal quantifier) governments and religions want to control the world. There are plenty of examples of xenophobic governments throughout history.
To thread. Yarn. Was it too witty? It is a ‘known’ fact within the scope of all conspiracy theories that all governments are evil. This and the following part of that post is trying to make sense of the internal reasoning of the story.
I can see that it’s difficult to get a point across in a few lines of post and I’m willing to put a more than equal share of the blame on my apparent inability to do so. I will not put up however with being linked to tinfoil-hattedness after I hopefully tried to explain better. Would you #%$*ing please stop doing it?
Any argument in which it is reasoned or merely hinted that A is a conspiracy because B is preposterous is open to attack, if there is just a single exception to B. The perfect conspiracy theory can, by definition, neither be proven nor disproven anyway, and it can only work against your case even if you only use it to show how ridiculous a connection is.
The ‘facts’ of conspiracy theories are loosely interchangeable. Somebody will come along and substitute “U.S.” with “Northwest Evilstan” and “calcium” with “plutonium”. They can and do really hide something there, and poof there goes your argument. “We refuted your reasoning here so why should it be right there? You didn’t prove anything and the government is ruled by an alien space fleet that hides on the far side of the moon. Nyah.” <- note quotation marks…
