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Non-Tech : Tulipomania Blowoff Contest: Why and When will it end? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RockyBalboa who wrote (2908)	7/2/2000 2:14:05 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3543

Fast Company Sometimes you see a product on the shelf and you ask yourself, "Can this possibly be for real?" Michael Sparks, 29, a marketing man and amateur physicist, started a small company, Radiant Labs, in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, Ill., in 1997. He and his dozen employees supply the aviation industry with specialty fluids. It's not a bad business, but growth is slow, and Mr. Sparks was itching for something bigger, a home-run consumer product to pump up profits. Inspiration struck in traffic one day, he said, when two thoughts crossed his mind in quick succession. He ought to get a radar detector for his new car, "which tends to be on the speedy side," he thought -- and, besides, it needed a shine. Hold it. One of his company's products is a recently declassified radar-absorptive coating for military jets. What if he polished his car with the stuff? Thus was born Stealth Guard, a carnauba wax that promises to help overexuberant motorists avoid speeding tickets, available on the company's Web site at $39.95 for a 16-ounce can. Skepticism is inevitable. "You have to ask yourself, 'How does a stealth airplane work?' " said David A. Buchholz, chairman of the physics department at Northwestern University. "I don't think you paint a plane to make it invisible." A thin coat of wax cannot stop radar waves from bouncing off a car's highly reflective metal surfaces, Dr. Buchholz said. Claims for the wax are actually fairly modest -- that it shortens the range at which typical police radar (but not laser speed devices) can pick up the car by about 13 percent. "It will give people who are 10 to 15 m.p.h. over the limit a chance to brake to legal speeds," Mr. Sparks said. Dr. Buchholz countered: "Isn't that exactly what a radar detector is supposed to do for you? And you're still violating the law." -- ELLEN ALMER