A life of teaching often makes a man unfit for conducting a normal conversation, either because he treats everybody as children, or because he repeats every sentence three times.
“Internet” Jones is a retired teacher, but in his case the affliction manifests itself as an air of superior knowledge about all subjects.
This makes it doubly amusing that he turned up at the workshop about two months ago to show us the clever magnet he bought from a tuning shop in Cape Town. It was supposed to improve the fuel consumption and performance on his petrol-engined 2007 Volkswagen Golf 2,0.
He showed us the magnet, installed over the fuel line as it enters the under-bonnet area, and explained that the magnetism breaks the fuel into its constituent parts before it reaches the engine, thus making combustion more efficient.
“The claimed fuel consumption improvement could be as much as 20 per cent,” he said, “but I’ve only measured about 12 per cent at present.”
We were all sceptical and I told him that it could not make any difference, but it was like talking to a deaf parrot. ..
Internet came back last week and lamented that the fuel consumption was back to its pre-magnet days. I sat him down, gave him a cup of tea and one of my wife’s raisin buns, and explained.
” I suspected you would come back at some stage, so I made copies of some articles from CAR. You can take them home to read. They will show that fuel does not respond to magnetism and that the combustion in a modern engine is about 98 per cent efficient, so that looking for improvements in that direction is a waste of time.”
“Yes, but I measured an improvement in consumption soon after I fitted the magnet,” he said. “How do you explain that?” “That’s the placebo effect,” I countered.”
You expected an improvement, so you found it. In addition, you drove more carefully and obeyed all the speed restrictions, because you were testing something.”
“How about this,” said Internet, and hauled out two sets of power and torque curves from the tuning shop that showed his engine delivering about 15 per cent more power and torque after installing the magnet.
My astonished look soon changed to smiles when I spotted how they fooled the computer into showing such a huge improvement.
I pointed out that both printouts showed the relevant ambient conditions and listed an impossibly huge drop in atmospheric pressure between the first chassis dynamometer run and the second one, causing the computer to apply a big correction factor to the “after” output, increasing its value to what they wanted to demonstrate.
I could have gone into more detail, but Internet had enough savvy to realise that he was, for once, out of his depth, and went away a wiser man.