Spiral tube above.

**!??//|~~ Long reply vanished when I lost my internet connection. I'm nearly to the point of finding a new service provider. Against that is that there are lots of links to my website which would immediately die.

Aagh, I took too long to add a couple of sentences and it happened again, but I didn't lose the main part this to so I hurry on with hope that I can get this posted.

Rem Amos's 'perpetual source of energy above.

Personal experience: There's no guards at the gates or building entrances at NBS/NIST during working hours, so anyonce can walk in. Some carrying a strange looking contraption headed for the nearest lab or office and demanded that NBS certify his perpetual motion machine. The display of course didn't work because he didn't want the government to steal his idea, so he'd left out a couple of simple but ingenous little pieces. Nevertheless, he want his certification document right NOW.

The other is the guy with the little bottle that allegedly contained his secret formula of a combination of enzymes and bacteria that would eat all the salt out of sea water and turn it into fresh water at minuscule cost. There didn't seem to be any cold fusion involved to get rid of the sodium and chlorine, and he didn't know where they went, they just went. That one was awkward because there weren't any biological science people around, and none of us had studied up on how enzymes and bacteria did their shitting. We thought that was probably the answer, but an inventor who's certain that he's on the threshold of fame and fortune is never going to buy that. So we just confessed our ignorance, and picked someone we had a bit of a grudge against and sent said inventor to him for more expert evaluation (no on had name badges so he never knew who had sent him on).

I've been f--ing around here for days now, so if there's no interesting fight brewing I'm going back to folk songs and music.