My human side is a bit disappointed. I wanted this to work like I wanted Santa to be real.
The realist in me knew it was all phony, and is overjoyed at the opportunity to stick it to the human side.
Well, here is a video of Sean’s talk to the press… not that he says anything interesting, mind.
Also, based on claims on their forums, they seem to have gathered at least €14 million in funding…
Sean claims in the video that he gave the engineers three days to built the demo prototype; according to their forums, the prototype was to be built from transparent materials in order to avert claims of hidden wires/batteries… I don’t know exactly where that information’s coming from, though.
Also, it appears that the ‘continuous motion’-device they were planning to showcase is a relatively recent development, their first device (which they were planning to demo should anything go wrong, but then apparently forgot about or something) was purportedly an apparatus involving a ‘start/stop’-motion thing… I’m not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean, but apparently they needed to ‘reset and restart’ the motion in each cycle in order to maintain a constant (as opposed to ever-increasing) cycle speed…
So, well, with the 14 mill on the scale, things are leaning heavily towards ‘scam’, I’d say…
Millions on the financial line.
Permanently changing the history of civilization on the line…
and three days to build the prototype.
I am forced to agree with your logic, HMHW.
Scam. Bozos, even, which is going to make it very painful for supporters who were not only scammed, but scammed by retards.
But I will be hopping back in to take credit for my Performance Art notion if it’s just a joke on me.
Randi’s website this week features a play by play of the recent Steorn nonevent.
Thanks!
A final bump… here’s a report from a guy (“drmike”) who was flown over to London at Steorn’s expense to see the “demo”. His opinion is that Steorn, or at least Sean McCarthy, is suffering from delusion. In other words, not scammers or hoaxers, but totally misguided.
Thanks for the bump…I understand how one guy can be delusional but I don’t understand how a whole group can.
If there is any further word, please post it. It will be interesting to see if the whole thing just withers with a whimper and it turns out to have been nothing more than incompetent scientists with a lot of enthusiasm but no brains.
Dunno - I suppose if he’s really gone completely off the deep end, announced to his workers that they’re going to start building a perpetual motion machine, then spectacularly fired the first few people who said “look, Sean, you’re talking bollocks man”, I could just about believe that the rest of the workforce might keep their heads down and try to ride it through, but even as I’m typing this, my brain is saying “that’s not very likely” - but so it is with every single possible explanation - they’re all not very likely, or that’s how it happens to appear - maybe that’s the real genius here - he’s started something that people just can’t make head or tail of.
My money is still on it being a proper scam though - and that there are already lots of people who have parted with money, behind the scenes that we don’t fully know about - and that it’s over - the scam is complete, all bar a few small details. I’m not taken in by the arguments that ‘he seemed so genuine and sincere’ - that’s what scammers are good at.
I won’t be at all surprised if McCarthy suddenly vanishes - perhaps making it look like murder/abduction/suicide.
I’m not saying I understand it either, but history is full of examples. Jim Jones. David Koresh. JZ Knight.
Yes, and it seems that the company is a pretty relaxed and fun place to work at, so if Sean is paying them a decent salary than I can see why they’d keep their heads down, at least for a time.
Yes, I’ve been wondering about this. I wonder if the whole “Sean is delusional / mentally ill” aspect will be played up leading up to such an event.
By the way, if you want a laugh, have a read of this mammoth report by a forum member of his trip to Ireland for a Steorn event. I honestly don’t know whether this guy is for real, but the writing style is like nothing I’ve ever read – it’s almost unbelievably hyperpedantic. Here’s a sample:
And so it goes on. And on. Pages of it, before his plane has even taken off. And what makes it even more surreal is the comments at the end of that thread from people saying what an excellent writer this guy is. It could almost be a finely crafted spoof… 
Reading between the lines, I still think it’s a deliberate scam. drmike’s description of McCarthy is precisely the description I would expect of a flim-flam artist. McCarthy’s selling snake oil, and the fact that he seems very enthusiastic doesn’t mean he doesn’t know it’s snake oil.
Groupthink is a powerful dynamic and it’s certainly possible the Steorn folks have deluded themselves, but it still seems unlikely to me that delusion at this scale could go on this long AND be accompanied by such transparently con-artist type moves. Why would self-delusion cause them to not bring a working model, or backup parts, to the public demo? Why would self-delusion cause them to be so cryptic on their own Web site? I know in theory they would not want to release tech details, but they release almost no details about anything at all and rarely update the site - indeed, there is no official word from them since the demo failed. (Last press release is July 6.) Why no release of the names of the scientists on the alleged jury? None of those things are indicative of delusion, they’re indicative of deception.
Just to use the recent demo fiasco as an example, let me ask you this; suppose you really had developed a working perpetual motion machine, you planned a public demo, and then for some unfortunate reason the test model you brought didn’t work. What would your damage control be? Steorn’s was to have McCarthy give a couple of pep talks, hand out some swag, and then run away with no word whatsoever of when they’d prove the technology except “stay tuned, it’ll work next time, whenever that is!” - in other words, they did exactly what you would expect of guys who did not, in fact, have a perpetual motion machine.
If you REALLY had one, what would you do? You’ve cried wolf and you’re the laughingstock of the world, unless you act fast. So you’d say “We’re so very sorry; this is quite an embarassment and we take full respnsibility for this screwup. I am p[ersonally going to Best Buy to buy some web cams, and then we’re headed back into corporate HQ to set them up around the working model, so we can do our demo that way. Then we will invite you nice folks who came out to see it live to come see it live in our HQ, because it really does work, and by Christ we’re going to prove it.” And you’d follow through on it, and have web site updates three times a day.
Never read anything by Harry Knowles, then? 
-Joe
*Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects.
And the reasons for this are obvious. Editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.
Like this for instance. "Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up the stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room, took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes one by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor. He put on his pyjamas, the blue ones with the stripe. He washed his face and hands, cleaned his teeth, went to the lavatory, realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong order, had to wash his hands again and went to bed. He read for fifteen minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that trying to work out where in the book he had got to the previous night, then he turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.
"It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.
"After that he moved restlessly in his sleep for a moment and then turned over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after this his eyes flickered briefly and he slightly scratched his nose, though there was still a good twenty minutes to go before he turned back on to his left side. And so he whiled the night away, sleeping.
“At four he got up and went to the lavatory again. He opened the door to the lavatory …” and so on.
It’s guff. It doesn’t advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. You don’t, in short, want to know…“What is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.*[right]–Douglas Adams, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish[/right]
This whole Orbo thing is just ripe for satire, although frankly it’s not much more vaporware than many companies in the height of the dot.com boom.
Stranger
Engadget interview with Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn.
It’s starting to look to me as if they haven’t actually seen a “generating” Orbo at all. See this quote, for instance:
In other words, we saw some measurements that weren’t what we expected. Big deal! And then when pressed about the actual efficiency/power output, he seems to switch to total gibberish mode:
I’ve read that several times and still can’t figure out what he means. I think that’s his intention, too.
A nation of 300 million agreed it was a good idea to invade Iraq, didn’t we? Next to that, a little box with spinning magnets is no biggie.
It makes sense to me, basically he’s saying the best percentage they can get out of the machine is 485%, but that doesn’t correspond to the best actual output they can produce, it’s only a theoretical maximum rather than useful number.
485% = 4.85 joules vs. 130% = 10 joules. The second settings produces more energy in terms of raw numbers, so that setting is more practical. Rather than having two of the machines running at higher efficiency, you have a single machine running at lower efficiency to produce the same amount of power.
That still doesn’t mean any of this is real or actually useful though. 
I guess I’m just having trouble relating the concept of “percentage efficiency” to a perpetual motion machine.
So the machine will output 10J at an efficiency of 130%. Which means the input has to be ~7.7J. OK, but now we can use 9J of the output to power the device itself, leaving 1J output, but now the input is 9J and the output is 11.7J… and now we can use 10J to power the machine leaving 1.7J output… and now the output is 13J and we can… and so on and so on until the Earth catches fire (or the device reaches a temperature equivalent to a warmish art gallery and promptly fails, of course!)
Quite, quite wonderfully and unintentionally Pooterish.
It reads somewhat like the Asperger’s kid in The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time. I wonder if, at any point in his interaction with the citizens of Dublin, babcat felt the need to do ‘rocking and groaning’?
The funny part is the guy announces he knows Steorn has a working free energy device because… they were really nice to him at a party. That makes him sure they’ve got a working free energy machine.
I don’t think that’s the usual method for testing a hypothesis.
I’ll bet anyone on the planet $1000 that they DON’T have a workiing free energy machine. $10,000. I’ll put it in writing.