Crop Circle Orgies Reviisited - Homeopathy

In an earlier post, we noted exceptions to the Internet's Rule 34.  IE, things exist that there is not porn of.  Well, it turns out that in at least one case - crop circle erotica - we were wrong.  There is this:  http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts3107226.aspx.  It's not good crop circle erotica - indeed, the crop circle motif doesn't enter until the last lines - but it exists.

If you want to find something, it helps to look for it.  I'm writing this post because I mentioned the earlier one in a Gawker.com comment, and someone sent me a link.  Why didn't I find it myself?  Unclear - perhaps it's new.  Or perhaps because I equated "porn" with pictures, not text; preconceptions are a kind of blindness.

Corollary:  it's difficult to find something you're not looking for.  Especially if you're not looking for it because you don't know it exists.  Carbon nanotubes, the wonder material of tomorrow, were first created in a lab in the 1950s, but owing to cold war secrecy, they weren't widely investigated in the West until the '90s.  Their story is fascinating, but we want to discuss them in the context of a much earlier "wonder material" - Damascus steel.

The technique for making Damascus steel was thought to be lost for centuries, until it's rediscovery .  But that's not the only unusual thing about it; part of it's legendary efficacy as sword/knife material comes from a very high tech feature: Damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes.

What does this have to do with Homeopathy?  Homeopathic medicines involve diluting the "active" ingredient to the point where no molecules of the original substance are present in the Homeopathic one; it is believed, however, that the Homeopathic fluid contains a "memory" of the active ingredient.

To science (circa 2014), this is quackery. We do not disagree - at least not yet. Perhaps Homeopaths should go to engineering school.  There, they could study memristors.

Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements - resistors, capacitors and inductors.  But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit - voltage, current, charge and flux - behave in the three basic elements. The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge.
Chua showed that his predicted device could remember the last voltage applied to it, and how long it had been applied. He dubbed the property "memristance" but the memristor was quietly forgotten because it was unclear how it could ever be built.

Only, they have since been observed - in the titanium dioxide molecules used in sunscreen:

Williams' team has now done just that, using nanoscale circuits including molecules of the active ingredient of sunscreen - titanium dioxide.
Such circuits are used to try and use small clumps of molecules to store the binary 0s and 1s of charge to work as computer memory.
However, these efforts have been dogged by bizarre electronic effects, says Williams, who has now worked out the reason. His titanium dioxide works as a memoristor - the mythical device has been found.

Does this mean it's time to do that Internet Tutorial on Homeopathy?  Probably not.  But we now have proof that "memory" effects are possible in nature, and that's a start.  And no, Googling (and Image searching) "nude homeopaths" does not return homeopath-related porn.