The 8008 1759

OK, Colonel Bearden, meet Colonel Forbin. Anyone who thinks that jiggling a permanent magnet in the middle of a high voltage transformer is going to open up an endless source of energy that will imperil the surrounding area with relativistic gravitational collapse doesn't *need* drugs.

Therefore, I demand you surrender all of your LSD. :)

That way I can enjoy traveling to see the remnants of Phish and the Grateful Dead while you're jiggling your Alnico or Samarium Cobalt. If you lay enough party favors on me and fire up the skyscraper I might even take a turn at jiggling the magnet.

The sad fact is that this guy was actually awarded a patent for his "motionless electromagnetic generator" despite the fact that the implementation was obviously a fake. Even the Energy Department was sufficiently deluded to temporarily place his invention on a web site of alternative energy sources.

This is a rather sad commentary on the wide scale lack of knowledge of scientific principles I learned in a public elementary school. Of course we also learned "nuclear secrets" like exactly how to build an atomic plant. We could even usually locate and change the weak tube in the family TV set.