7 ms·

Didn't we find out some time ago that certain elements within USG are chartered to draw up patents (possibly this one) to cause adversaries to become distracted

Didn't we find out some time ago that certain elements within USG are chartered to draw up patents (possibly this one) to cause adversaries to become distracted, lost, concerned, in the mood to spend remaining budgets on fantasy projects, and so on? Ah...OK, so on further reading this is Dr. Pais. So yeah there is speculation about his patents being intentional scams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais (How wild would it be to be paid to come up with FANTASTIC PATENTS though, and maybe they don't _tell_ you they're using your fully-functional fantasy world to cause China to burn cash?) https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/02/08/what-is-behind-the-us-navys-ufo-fusion-energy-patent/?sh=5b1e9a524733 https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/02/08/what-is-b... Star Wars (the former USG program) was also apparently based on faked data in order to get USSR to burn cash

heavyset_go 4y ago
> Didn't we find out some time ago that certain elements within USG are chartered to draw up patents (possibly this one) to cause adversaries to become distracted, lost, concerned, in the mood to spend remaining budgets on fantasy projects, and so on? Yes, and the US government also investigates and invests in adversaries' fantasy projects, as well. It's how we got things like the Stargate Project[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Ah, OK--that was quite a cultural thing at the time too, right? Isn't that where the Columbo episode "Columbo Goes to the Guillotine" got its inspiration? It starts out with a fraudulent remote-viewing scam, with the pentagon brass as marks. I think there was a MacGyver episode with remote viewing, too...GX-1 or something.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I believe Stargate and SRI are the origins of the concept of remote viewing as it became popularly known.
    - aa-jv 4y ago
      Scientology is where it comes from (exteriorization), 'remote viewing' is the US governments' re-brand .. Ingo Swann was a scientologist before he became a government-paid spook. There are some in the psychic community who believe the US government and Scientology are in cahoots to further weaponise things, and that this is why the Trementina base-swap was done...
      - heavyset_go 4y ago
        > Ingo Swann was a scientologist before he became a government-paid spook. I didn't know this, but it makes so much sense now that I do. > There are some in the psychic community who believe the US government and Scientology are in cahoots to further weaponise things, and that this is why the Trementina base-swap was done... I'm mostly familiar with what the key figures in SRI did and have done since then, they've seemed to foster weird cottage industry around remote viewing that still exists (and are run by those same key figures) today. I've worked backwards from today to their origins at SRI, so there's a lot of that history that I'm unfamiliar with, like the Scientology connection. Looks like they've done a good job at moving away from those types of associations. Really puts into context phenomena like early RVers viewing aliens, UFOs and whatnot that fit into Scientology beliefs and mythos.
        aa-jv 4y ago
        You'd be surprised how 'real' all of this seems to its proponents. I think thats the part that interests the spooks the most - how you can get sub-cultures like this to believe, almost anything ..
dougSF70 4y ago
There used to be a column in the Uk Magazine "New Scientist" called Daedalus. The writer would conjure inventions that would seem to work but there was an obvious flaw, if I recall correctly. The BBC did a documentary about him and in this short piece he revealed that some of his wrong-headed inventions had been patented in Russia...
- dcminter 4y ago
  I love Daedalus (David E.H. Jones) - he also wrote the column for Nature for a while. It's kind of astounding that the two "Inventions of Daedalus" books aren't better known (or indeed in print) these days - especially given the success of Randall Munroe's books. Sometimes his inventions were entirely tongue in cheek, but quite a lot of them had their feet in reality. Notable examples that spring to mind are a laser-controlled 3D resin printer, and the notion that one could construct large spherical carbon molecules!
  - dougSF70 4y ago
    Here is the obit from the Guardian with some more choice inventions/discoveries David Jones, who has died aged 79, was a physical chemist and writer who, through his columns under the pseudonym Daedalus, entertained readers of New Scientist, Nature and the Guardian for more than 30 years. His ideas for inventions started from secure principles and wove a plausible tale through to the impossible – or so he thought. In fact, many turned out to be feasible. His version of 3D printing with lasers even landed him in a patent dispute in 1974. He described how to coat the moon in a reflective layer so that northerners would be released from their dark winters and “lovers would blink in its unromantic glare”. His remote-controlled painting machine would climb walls with the aid of slug slime and allow mountain bikes to go up vertical cliffs. He foresaw the problems of the information age and proposed a system of computerised billing that paid a fee every time personal information was passed on. Daedalus and his fictional company, Dreadco (Daedalus Research Evaluation and Development Corp), set out, like many scientists, to trace the consequences of a “what if” idea. The difference for Daedalus was that he built in an intentional flaw. While professional scientists find all too often that their ideas fail, Daedalus anticipated failure but instead sometimes found that his ideas succeeded. In 1966, he proposed to make hollow molecular balls by persuading sheets of graphite to close up (graphite is composed of sheets of carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire). In 1985, Harry Kroto, Robert Curl and Rick Smalley described just such a molecule, carbon-60 (now known as a buckminsterfullerene), for which they received the Nobel prize in 1996. A mutual friend pointed out the Daedalus column to Kroto, who acknowledged it in his Nobel lecture. David anticipated the development of the chemical laser by a year and pitched it as a weapon for shooting down ballistic missiles. Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan proposed this same idea in his star wars programme. In 1980 David speculated in a BBC Radio Scotland programme that Napoleon might not have been poisoned by arsenic deliberately as suggested by analysis of his hair, but as a result of the wallpaper in his rooms on St Helena. In a damp environment, the mould on a particular green pigment, fashionable at that time, catalyses the generation of a toxic gas containing arsenic. Tongue in cheek, David asked if any listener knew the colour of Napoleon’s wallpaper. To his amazement a woman wrote in that a scrapbook had been handed down to her containing an actual sample. David’s research on that piece of wallpaper, published in Nature (1982), showed that the pigment was indeed present. David started writing his Daedalus columns for New Scientist in 1964 and continued there for 24 years before transferring to Nature and the Guardian. The columns were compiled in The Inventions of Daedalus (1982) and The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999), both illustrated by his own cartoons. David Jones produced this cartoon to illustrate his ‘invention’ of audible vertigo. He captioned it: ‘Vertigosound could clear public buildings humanely of starlings, pigeons etc, by making the birds overbalance from the narrow ledges.’ David Jones produced this cartoon to illustrate his ‘invention’ of audible vertigo. He captioned it: ‘Vertigosound could clear public buildings humanely of starlings, pigeons etc, by making the birds overbalance from the narrow ledges.’ Photograph: Freeman Television was another outlet for his ingenuity. In the mid-70s, David was the man behind the scenes for Yorkshire Television’s Don’t Ask Me with Magnus Pyke and The Scientific Eye with Adam Hart-Davis. Finding that the questions from the studio audience did not lend themselves to demonstrations, he built the demonstrations first and then planted questions in the audience. Eventually, frustrated by health and safety restrictions, he left YTV and began presenting on the German TV science quiz show Kopf um Kopf (Head to Head), where he stayed for eight years. In 1987 he was the subject of a BBC QED programme, which realised one of his inventions: a bus on which each passenger was given a steering wheel, and which then proceeded in a “majority” direction. David’s book The Aha! Moment (2012) muses on the creativity of science, describing the unconscious mind as “the random ideas generator”, with some of his demonstrations as examples: a birthday cake with 100 candles that light simultaneously; a Frisbee that levitates on a column of air; a geyser that blows once a minute. David made these gadgets out of simple components: the geyser used an electric kettle, copper pipe, a bicycle inner tube and some glass tubing. His house in Newcastle was filled with the detritus of these experiments – a veritable Aladdin’s cave. The secret of one invention was never revealed, even to his closest friends – the fake perpetual motion machine. The idea of perpetual motion violates the laws of physics, as was proved in the 19th century, yet David fooled many into thinking it was possible through his machines, all incorporating a spinning bicycle wheel with no obvious power source. He exhibited them in science museums worldwide, and kept one at home, which was still spinning when I last visited a few months ago. David was born in south London to Philip, a copywriter, and Dorothea (née Sitters), a secretary. During his childhood he built rockets, played with photography and drew animated cartoons. He attended Eltham college then studied chemistry at Imperial College, London, as an undergraduate, research student and postdoctoral researcher (1956-67). He started writing the Daedalus column for New Scientist during this time, through a student friend who had begun working at the magazine. Following a year teaching at Strathclyde University, he went to work for ICI in Runcorn as a spectroscopist. I met him soon afterwards and he told me about his trials of unrideable bicycles in the ICI car park, part of his investigations into bicycle stability. The most popular theory claimed that the forces generated by a revolving wheel stabilised the bike (the gyroscope theory). His experiments killed off that idea, but he found he could make a bike unrideable by changing the geometry of the steering. These studies led to his most influential genuine scientific publication (Physics Today, 1970). In 1973, he moved with a research fellowship to the chemistry department at Newcastle University, where I was then a research student. He remained a guest member of the department and lived in the city for the rest of his life. He received the Shaw medal from Nottingham University in 1996 and an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University the following year. His columns continued until 2000, when David suffered a stroke. After his recovery he continued writing, but retired Daedalus. David’s final book, Why Are We Conscious?, inspired by his experience of the stroke, was published earlier this year. A documentary film about David, Perpetual Motion Machine (2009), explores not only his genius, but also his recovery. David loved to entertain, but privately he was a loner with a sceptical view of humanity, as is apparent in his last column: “The big problem is the readiness with which human beings tell lies. Indeed, this is almost the defining mark of humanity.”
mike_d 4y ago
Based on FOIA requests, the Navy did internal reviews and demos of the technology. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37134/emails-show-navys-ufo-patents-went-through-significant-internal-review-resulted-in-a-demo https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37134/emails-show-navy... On one hand I believe it is outside the realm of reality, but on the other hand handheld super computers and planes that could fly themselves were science fiction within my lifetime too.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  That's a long-as article! Wow. Seems there are also some interesting recent developments & questions on/about Pais: He asked someone else to share his paper, SUPERFORCE, on social media...a unification of quantum field theory with general relativity; the Eridanus Supervoid may be a window into another universe https://twitter.com/TheProjectUnity/status/1620177725532282880/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TheProjectUnity/status/16201777255322828... There's also some speculation that the below is Pais' twitter account? https://twitter.com/hotte_ken https://twitter.com/hotte_ken https://twitter.com/JulienGeffray/status/1620034382240301056?s=20 https://twitter.com/JulienGeffray/status/1620034382240301056... (Gotta say there are aspects of his working style that raise lots of red flags for me personally, just by looking at the effect. The USG also has an Einstein-complex of sorts since the 1940s, and by golly if he doesn't feign to release that metaphorical sword from its stone rather triumphantly)
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  I mean, if one were going to invent a fake technology to waste everyone’s time, it would be pretty easy to also invent fake paperwork about said technology.
andrewfong 4y ago
If it doesn't exist already, someone should write a story where the USG patents a ludicrously impossible perpetual motion machine or something to force China to burn cash, but then China actually claims to have created one and then both sides are scrambling to see if anyone actually invented something or if everyone's pulling each other's legs.
- brmgb 4y ago
  I think you should read Pynchon if you haven’t already. The spirit is somewhat the same and Gravity Rainbow deals with a weapon development.
- beAbU 4y ago
  Too late, Leslie Nielsen would have been perfect as the lead character.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Ooh, I love it. Plus, maybe throw in that aspect from Polygon where the inventors of the devices are early-Internet pals who are conspiring toward the death of the military officers who previously sent the inventors' children to death overseas... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8rVp9rwaS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8rVp9rwaS0
RF_Savage 4y ago
Reminds me of NAIL SPIKE from the short story "A Tall Tail" by Charlie Stross. https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/
- Oxidation 4y ago
  Also Running Blind by Desmond Bagley.
- philiplu 4y ago
  That was a fun read. Arthur C. Clarke's "Tales From the White Hart" meets Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With", with Lowe showing up in the comments afterwards. Thanks for the link.
pfdietz 4y ago
I've thought Bussard's Polywell was in this category.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> Didn't we find out some time ago that certain elements within USG are chartered to draw up patents (possibly this one) to cause adversaries to become distracted, lost, concerned, in the mood to spend remaining budgets on fantasy projects, and so on? Yes, and the US government also investigates and invests in adversaries' fantasy projects, as well. It's how we got things like the Stargate Project[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

themodelplumber 4y ago
Ah, OK--that was quite a cultural thing at the time too, right? Isn't that where the Columbo episode "Columbo Goes to the Guillotine" got its inspiration? It starts out with a fraudulent remote-viewing scam, with the pentagon brass as marks. I think there was a MacGyver episode with remote viewing, too...GX-1 or something.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I believe Stargate and SRI are the origins of the concept of remote viewing as it became popularly known.
  - aa-jv 4y ago
    Scientology is where it comes from (exteriorization), 'remote viewing' is the US governments' re-brand .. Ingo Swann was a scientologist before he became a government-paid spook. There are some in the psychic community who believe the US government and Scientology are in cahoots to further weaponise things, and that this is why the Trementina base-swap was done...
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      > Ingo Swann was a scientologist before he became a government-paid spook. I didn't know this, but it makes so much sense now that I do. > There are some in the psychic community who believe the US government and Scientology are in cahoots to further weaponise things, and that this is why the Trementina base-swap was done... I'm mostly familiar with what the key figures in SRI did and have done since then, they've seemed to foster weird cottage industry around remote viewing that still exists (and are run by those same key figures) today. I've worked backwards from today to their origins at SRI, so there's a lot of that history that I'm unfamiliar with, like the Scientology connection. Looks like they've done a good job at moving away from those types of associations. Really puts into context phenomena like early RVers viewing aliens, UFOs and whatnot that fit into Scientology beliefs and mythos.
      - aa-jv 4y ago
        You'd be surprised how 'real' all of this seems to its proponents. I think thats the part that interests the spooks the most - how you can get sub-cultures like this to believe, almost anything ..

dougSF70 4y ago

There used to be a column in the Uk Magazine "New Scientist" called Daedalus. The writer would conjure inventions that would seem to work but there was an obvious flaw, if I recall correctly. The BBC did a documentary about him and in this short piece he revealed that some of his wrong-headed inventions had been patented in Russia...

dcminter 4y ago
I love Daedalus (David E.H. Jones) - he also wrote the column for Nature for a while. It's kind of astounding that the two "Inventions of Daedalus" books aren't better known (or indeed in print) these days - especially given the success of Randall Munroe's books. Sometimes his inventions were entirely tongue in cheek, but quite a lot of them had their feet in reality. Notable examples that spring to mind are a laser-controlled 3D resin printer, and the notion that one could construct large spherical carbon molecules!
- dougSF70 4y ago
  Here is the obit from the Guardian with some more choice inventions/discoveries David Jones, who has died aged 79, was a physical chemist and writer who, through his columns under the pseudonym Daedalus, entertained readers of New Scientist, Nature and the Guardian for more than 30 years. His ideas for inventions started from secure principles and wove a plausible tale through to the impossible – or so he thought. In fact, many turned out to be feasible. His version of 3D printing with lasers even landed him in a patent dispute in 1974. He described how to coat the moon in a reflective layer so that northerners would be released from their dark winters and “lovers would blink in its unromantic glare”. His remote-controlled painting machine would climb walls with the aid of slug slime and allow mountain bikes to go up vertical cliffs. He foresaw the problems of the information age and proposed a system of computerised billing that paid a fee every time personal information was passed on. Daedalus and his fictional company, Dreadco (Daedalus Research Evaluation and Development Corp), set out, like many scientists, to trace the consequences of a “what if” idea. The difference for Daedalus was that he built in an intentional flaw. While professional scientists find all too often that their ideas fail, Daedalus anticipated failure but instead sometimes found that his ideas succeeded. In 1966, he proposed to make hollow molecular balls by persuading sheets of graphite to close up (graphite is composed of sheets of carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire). In 1985, Harry Kroto, Robert Curl and Rick Smalley described just such a molecule, carbon-60 (now known as a buckminsterfullerene), for which they received the Nobel prize in 1996. A mutual friend pointed out the Daedalus column to Kroto, who acknowledged it in his Nobel lecture. David anticipated the development of the chemical laser by a year and pitched it as a weapon for shooting down ballistic missiles. Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan proposed this same idea in his star wars programme. In 1980 David speculated in a BBC Radio Scotland programme that Napoleon might not have been poisoned by arsenic deliberately as suggested by analysis of his hair, but as a result of the wallpaper in his rooms on St Helena. In a damp environment, the mould on a particular green pigment, fashionable at that time, catalyses the generation of a toxic gas containing arsenic. Tongue in cheek, David asked if any listener knew the colour of Napoleon’s wallpaper. To his amazement a woman wrote in that a scrapbook had been handed down to her containing an actual sample. David’s research on that piece of wallpaper, published in Nature (1982), showed that the pigment was indeed present. David started writing his Daedalus columns for New Scientist in 1964 and continued there for 24 years before transferring to Nature and the Guardian. The columns were compiled in The Inventions of Daedalus (1982) and The Further Inventions of Daedalus (1999), both illustrated by his own cartoons. David Jones produced this cartoon to illustrate his ‘invention’ of audible vertigo. He captioned it: ‘Vertigosound could clear public buildings humanely of starlings, pigeons etc, by making the birds overbalance from the narrow ledges.’ David Jones produced this cartoon to illustrate his ‘invention’ of audible vertigo. He captioned it: ‘Vertigosound could clear public buildings humanely of starlings, pigeons etc, by making the birds overbalance from the narrow ledges.’ Photograph: Freeman Television was another outlet for his ingenuity. In the mid-70s, David was the man behind the scenes for Yorkshire Television’s Don’t Ask Me with Magnus Pyke and The Scientific Eye with Adam Hart-Davis. Finding that the questions from the studio audience did not lend themselves to demonstrations, he built the demonstrations first and then planted questions in the audience. Eventually, frustrated by health and safety restrictions, he left YTV and began presenting on the German TV science quiz show Kopf um Kopf (Head to Head), where he stayed for eight years. In 1987 he was the subject of a BBC QED programme, which realised one of his inventions: a bus on which each passenger was given a steering wheel, and which then proceeded in a “majority” direction. David’s book The Aha! Moment (2012) muses on the creativity of science, describing the unconscious mind as “the random ideas generator”, with some of his demonstrations as examples: a birthday cake with 100 candles that light simultaneously; a Frisbee that levitates on a column of air; a geyser that blows once a minute. David made these gadgets out of simple components: the geyser used an electric kettle, copper pipe, a bicycle inner tube and some glass tubing. His house in Newcastle was filled with the detritus of these experiments – a veritable Aladdin’s cave. The secret of one invention was never revealed, even to his closest friends – the fake perpetual motion machine. The idea of perpetual motion violates the laws of physics, as was proved in the 19th century, yet David fooled many into thinking it was possible through his machines, all incorporating a spinning bicycle wheel with no obvious power source. He exhibited them in science museums worldwide, and kept one at home, which was still spinning when I last visited a few months ago. David was born in south London to Philip, a copywriter, and Dorothea (née Sitters), a secretary. During his childhood he built rockets, played with photography and drew animated cartoons. He attended Eltham college then studied chemistry at Imperial College, London, as an undergraduate, research student and postdoctoral researcher (1956-67). He started writing the Daedalus column for New Scientist during this time, through a student friend who had begun working at the magazine. Following a year teaching at Strathclyde University, he went to work for ICI in Runcorn as a spectroscopist. I met him soon afterwards and he told me about his trials of unrideable bicycles in the ICI car park, part of his investigations into bicycle stability. The most popular theory claimed that the forces generated by a revolving wheel stabilised the bike (the gyroscope theory). His experiments killed off that idea, but he found he could make a bike unrideable by changing the geometry of the steering. These studies led to his most influential genuine scientific publication (Physics Today, 1970). In 1973, he moved with a research fellowship to the chemistry department at Newcastle University, where I was then a research student. He remained a guest member of the department and lived in the city for the rest of his life. He received the Shaw medal from Nottingham University in 1996 and an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University the following year. His columns continued until 2000, when David suffered a stroke. After his recovery he continued writing, but retired Daedalus. David’s final book, Why Are We Conscious?, inspired by his experience of the stroke, was published earlier this year. A documentary film about David, Perpetual Motion Machine (2009), explores not only his genius, but also his recovery. David loved to entertain, but privately he was a loner with a sceptical view of humanity, as is apparent in his last column: “The big problem is the readiness with which human beings tell lies. Indeed, this is almost the defining mark of humanity.”

mike_d 4y ago

Based on FOIA requests, the Navy did internal reviews and demos of the technology. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37134/emails-show-navys-ufo-patents-went-through-significant-internal-review-resulted-in-a-demo https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37134/emails-show-navy... On one hand I believe it is outside the realm of reality, but on the other hand handheld super computers and planes that could fly themselves were science fiction within my lifetime too.

themodelplumber 4y ago
That's a long-as article! Wow. Seems there are also some interesting recent developments & questions on/about Pais: He asked someone else to share his paper, SUPERFORCE, on social media...a unification of quantum field theory with general relativity; the Eridanus Supervoid may be a window into another universe https://twitter.com/TheProjectUnity/status/1620177725532282880/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TheProjectUnity/status/16201777255322828... There's also some speculation that the below is Pais' twitter account? https://twitter.com/hotte_ken https://twitter.com/hotte_ken https://twitter.com/JulienGeffray/status/1620034382240301056?s=20 https://twitter.com/JulienGeffray/status/1620034382240301056... (Gotta say there are aspects of his working style that raise lots of red flags for me personally, just by looking at the effect. The USG also has an Einstein-complex of sorts since the 1940s, and by golly if he doesn't feign to release that metaphorical sword from its stone rather triumphantly)
snowwrestler 4y ago
I mean, if one were going to invent a fake technology to waste everyone’s time, it would be pretty easy to also invent fake paperwork about said technology.

andrewfong 4y ago

If it doesn't exist already, someone should write a story where the USG patents a ludicrously impossible perpetual motion machine or something to force China to burn cash, but then China actually claims to have created one and then both sides are scrambling to see if anyone actually invented something or if everyone's pulling each other's legs.

brmgb 4y ago
I think you should read Pynchon if you haven’t already. The spirit is somewhat the same and Gravity Rainbow deals with a weapon development.
beAbU 4y ago
Too late, Leslie Nielsen would have been perfect as the lead character.
themodelplumber 4y ago
Ooh, I love it. Plus, maybe throw in that aspect from Polygon where the inventors of the devices are early-Internet pals who are conspiring toward the death of the military officers who previously sent the inventors' children to death overseas... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8rVp9rwaS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8rVp9rwaS0

RF_Savage 4y ago

Reminds me of NAIL SPIKE from the short story "A Tall Tail" by Charlie Stross. https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

Oxidation 4y ago
Also Running Blind by Desmond Bagley.
philiplu 4y ago
That was a fun read. Arthur C. Clarke's "Tales From the White Hart" meets Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With", with Lowe showing up in the comments afterwards. Thanks for the link.

pfdietz 4y ago

I've thought Bussard's Polywell was in this category.