subject:"\[Vo\]\:Steorn Demo"


At 03:42 PM 12/18/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

However, bilked may not be it. Rather, he set up a speculative 
investment opportunity for people, under this particular theory: 
now that you know we don't actually have anything yet -- we might 
find the magic wand waving technique! but, you know, those stupid 
physicists say it's impossible -- you have the option of leaving 
your money in, and as long as our research program can stay open, 
you'll get payments from the new people buying in. So you can make 
some money, if it lasts long enough.


That would be a Ponzi scheme. That's against the law, at least in 
the U.S. If the authorities found out about it they would shut down 
the company immediately.


This would depend on certain details, and, as well, on local law. My 
sense is that it could be managed so as to not be illegal.


Is it legal for them to charge for revealing the reality of the 
situation? That reality could include investigation of the devices. 
The leave your investment in option could actually be a 
reinvestment, i.e., the conversion of a payment for disclosure to an 
explicit investment in the company, perhaps with preferred stock, 
which then is paid based on the profits of the company, or perhaps 
profits within a certain area, such as sales of disclosures.


To determine if this would be illegal in the U.S., I'd need to look 
more carefully at our law. Multilevel marketing, though, runs on a 
very similar process, and is legal if structured properly.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread Esa Ruoho

how do we find this


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 5:42 PM, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson 
svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote:

 According to one of my latest Google news alerts Steorn just made CNN
 news. However, I can't seem to find the link anywhere on cnn's web
 site.

 Does anyone know anything about this?

 Regards
 Steven Vincent Johnson
 www.OrionWorks.com
 www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 04:46 PM 12/18/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

-- I think it's unlikely that they're cash positive right now, if we 
leave cash flow from stock sales off the balance sheet.  But, that 
doesn't really matter much; with repeated rounds of financing, 
companies can go for years in a cash-negative, money-losing state.


With the officers collecting salaries all along the way. There are 
two basic ways to survive in this situation: loans and investment. 
Loans are tricky, if a corporation has negative cash flow and failed 
product launches, my guess is that loans can get difficult to find. 
But investment can still be managed, if you have something you are 
doing that is or might be making money. Many of these here assume 
that this product is Orbo. It might not be, not exactly. It might be 
peeks at Orbo. And if you don't do anything to seriously upset those 
who have signed the NDA, the cat doesn't get to jump out of the bag.


Thanks for your signing the agreement and for your confidence in us 
as represented by your $400 payment. As soon as that payment clears, 
you will get an access code to look at our full disclosure of 
everything. Let us know what you think when you have looked at it.


I'm sorry that you were disappointed in our disclosure. Is there 
anything there that was contrary to your reasonable expectations? 
However, we don't want anyone to be disappointed. We require 
developers to take 30 days to fully review and do not accept 
termination requests during that period. However, if, after that, you 
wish to withdraw from being a developer, please let us know within 
the following 30 days and we will provide to you the termination 
agreement; upon your signature on that, we will refund your payment in full.


As you have provided your signature on the document, your refund 
will be issued within 60 days as provided in the termination 
agreement. Thank you for your interest in Orbo. We remind you that 
all details that were disclosed to you remain completely 
confidential, and we vigorously enforce the non-disclosure agreement, 
because confidentiality is the core of necessity at this point.


So, they take up to 90 days to return the $400. Meanwhile the mark is 
highly motivated to remain silent, for sure, knowing that if he 
breaks the confidentiality agreement, as provided in the original NDA 
and the termination agreement, the refund will not be issued and, in 
fact, he may owe more money as liquidated damages, or face a lawsuit. 
Meanwhile the money is drawing interest if it is put into 
interest-bearing securities or deposits. Steorn doesn't have to do 
that, and if Steorn goes backrupt, anyone owed money may be screwed. 
But if they play it very conservatively, they get three month's 
interest on $400, or, say, $4.00, enough to pay the costs of running 
this shell game.


But as part of the termination process, they offer an opportunity to 
become an investor with the money, and they give incentives. The 
language is such that it appears they are offering investment in the 
technology, but they make sure that it's pointed out to the mark that 
even if the technology doesn't work out, because of the basic laws of 
physics or other nonsense, the now-investor may still make money, and 
good money. Yes, absolutely, it's a Ponzi scheme, in reality, but 
probably not, because of the investment-in-technology aspect, not an 
illegal one.


With this device, they have attracted people who might be inclined to 
believe that over-unity is possible, otherwise they wouldn't bother 
(other than sheer curiosity, which may trap a few cats as well). If 
the Orbo investigation is sophisicated enough, the physics of it 
might be fun. Some people might keep their money in just for that.


It's been said that I'm making assumptions. Sure, but probably 
reasonable ones. However, don't mistake my speculations as to what 
might be under the NDA covers with assumptions that this is what they 
are doing. I'm merely pointing out that, from what we see, a very 
clever and sophisticated and legal scam might be under way. The 
advertising on al-Jazeera was brilliant. They are taking the most 
negative material and turning it into a hook. For their target 
audience, I'd expect it to be very effective.


Remember, the ad could fail with 99.99% of the people who see it, who 
might indeed leave with the impression that Orbo is just plain weird. 
But they pull the rug out from under critics who respond, in a 
knee-jerk way, as I've seen on YouTube many times: Obviously you 
idiots don't realize that what you are doing is completely contrary 
to the laws of physics.


Because obviously they realize that *this will be the opinion of 
nearly everyone who knows the laws of physics.* By incorporating 
that into their ad, they create a certain level of rapport with these 
people, it is a classic trick employed by hypnotists and marketers. 
Incorporate the possible rejection, then reframe it.


-- In the United States, the

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread Esa Ruoho

tl;dr


On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:53 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
a...@lomaxdesign.comwrote:

 At 04:46 PM 12/18/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread Jed Rothwell


Esa Ruoho wrote:


tl;dr


My thoughts exactly. Speculation has indeed run rampant!

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread Esa Ruoho

so, is there anything any of you would like me to do at the waterways
thingo? i'll be there around tuesday. i've been asked by a friend to take a
close-up photo of the battery, and just generally wave my iphone around the
motor (since the current cameras arent really closeup enough).. and uhh
yeah.


On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:59 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote:

 Esa Ruoho wrote:

  tl;dr


 My thoughts exactly. Speculation has indeed run rampant!

 - Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 05:43 PM 12/18/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:

Mongo want to see a light bulb real soon.

No light bulb soon, Mongo send candygram to Sean.

Light bulb! Light bulb! Light bulb!


Steorn response simple: light bulb. Lights up. What does that mean?

Or not. Whatever they think will have the maximum effect on delay. 
They can create whatever appearance they want. It's not illegal to 
put on a show and pretend that something is what it is not, unless 
you collect investment without disclosing that there were deceptive 
statements made in public to fool competitors or for whatever 
reason. You don't defraud someone specific, there is no fraud. There 
is, in most places anyway, no law against fooling the public with 
deceptive evidence. Or else a lot of politicians would be going to 
jail. Happens all the time. Not just politicians. Companies advertise 
products with deceptive advertising as to quality. In some places 
they can outright lie, in others, they have to be more subtle. 
Puffery, exaggeration without specifics, is legal almost everywhere.


Our product is better than theirs isn't specific, it's not a 
provable statement either way unless far better specified. Perhaps 
their product makes a better doorstop. They didn't say what it was better at.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 05:27 PM 12/18/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:


On 12/18/2009 02:31 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 11:02 PM 12/17/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

Sounds good. But magicians don't usually start by working to convince
everyone that they are incompetent liars. That's a label nobody wants
to start with.


I have experienced the exact opposite. They are very good at starting
with that label, they amplify it and play with it.


Eh, hold on -- they do it for a few seconds, a few minutes, perhaps 
more than a few minutes.  They patter away, with an ace of hearts 
glued to the back of their jacket where all can see it, or whatever.


But very soon, far sooner than the timeout after which the 
audience leaves in disgust, they do something which reveals they are 
monumentally clever after all.


These magicians are playing a longer game, to a far wider audience, 
with a longer attention span.


Imagine, instead, a magic show where the magicians did nothing but 
show tricks that didn't work, or do slight of hand where all could 
see the hidden card on the back of the hand, or attempted to juggle 
but dropped the balls -- imagine that they did this for the ENTIRE 
FIRST HALF of the show.


Then there's the intermission.

Then, only after the intermission, they show that they can really 
pull off some fine stunts.


Only problem -- the hall's kind of empty at that point, because an 
awful lot of folks didn't come back after the break.


Timing. When is the intermission for Steorn? Is it scheduled? 
Scheduling one is part of what they might do. We have decided to 
close all public activites for X months to give us time to focus on 
blah, blah. We will open a new public demo, which will reveal far 
more about our technology than has been previously revealed, on [six 
months away].


That would be a show where the magician started by CONVINCING the 
audience that he was an incompetent liar.


It's been more than seconds, minutes, days -- it's been years -- 
Steorn has yet to show the clever part.  All they've shown is the boobery.


What they've shown is that they can continue to attract attention, 
and that's exactly what they need.



,..


Sure, sure, sure. The bit about magicians is all true. But what makes
you think that Steorn fills the bill of a skilled magician? What
EVIDENCE is there that anyone at Steorn is competent to pull off any
kind of convincing demo of anything?


The level of competence required for the convincing demo -- if we
allow actual fraud -- is low. I'm sure I could build it, just give me a
little money.


Hah!  Indeed, I'm absolutely sure you could.  But, you're not an 
average Joe off the street.  What makes you think anybody at 
Steorn is as competent as you?  Your definition of a low level of 
competence probably doesn't match most folks'.


There are countless people who could build it. You hire one. They 
have the money to do it, should it be that nobody already involved 
could do it. There is a hint, by the way, as to what they intend to 
do, and are doing: they have a product that is pre-announced or 
something like that. Very low friction bearings. Now, why would you 
need very-low friction bearings? Only if you have some perpetual 
motion imitation that needs to run for a long time on inertia or with 
extremely low power input. Or, alternatively, you have found, or 
believe you have found, some tiny effect, an energy anomaly. So to 
demonstrate it, you need a system with extremely low losses. However, 
if that is all you have, you are nowhere near having found something 
that can be exploited for power production, for you aren't producing 
enough power to overcome losses in ordinary bearings. That isn't much power!


And suppose their real product is very-low-friction bearings? They 
would have, with their best demonstration -- which hasn't been rolled 
out, I suspect -- demonstrated these bearings. They would, when 
ready, pull off the wraps, disclose the trick, and show what a very 
low power input was necessary to keep the beastie running.


All I'm saying is that thinking of them as just plain stupid and 
incompetent could be quite premature. There other other explanations, 
for sure, and it seems to me that some of those explanations are more 
likely than the incompetent boobs theory.


I'm serious here.  I have seen no evidence of such competence at 
Steorn.  In the absence of such evidence, I see no reason to believe 
it's present.


Elsewhere you contradict yourself. Here you are using competence as 
the skill to build a convincing demonstration of nothing, a fraud. 
But you can hire that competence, at a price that they could clearly afford.


Assuming incompetence is all staged, and that more apparent 
incompetence just proves it's staged better -- well, it's an 
assumption, and I can't really see any reason for retaining it.


It's not an assumption, it's an organizing hypothesis. It explains 
the behavior so far. Got a better one?



But this argument of ours

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson

Abd sez:

 Mongo want to see a light bulb real soon.
 
 No light bulb soon, Mongo send candygram to Sean.
 
 Light bulb! Light bulb! Light bulb!
 
 Steorn response simple: light bulb. Lights up. What does that mean?

Mongo sez: 

Abd not serious! Even Mongo KNOWS what Light bulb means!

[And then, during another rare pensive moment, Mongo adds:]

Mongo not sure Abd knows what light bulb means.

Regards

Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence




On 12/19/2009 05:53 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 04:46 PM 12/18/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:


-- I think it's unlikely that they're cash positive right now, if we
leave cash flow from stock sales off the balance sheet. But, that
doesn't really matter much; with repeated rounds of financing,
companies can go for years in a cash-negative, money-losing state.


With the officers collecting salaries all along the way. There are two
basic ways to survive in this situation: loans and investment. Loans are
tricky, if a corporation has negative cash flow and failed product
launches, my guess is that loans can get difficult to find.


Sure can!  This is when honest entrepreneurs who are having problems 
often sign personal notes.  It gets the cash flowing again, and with 
luck it may keep it flowing long enough to get the product out the door, 
to get the next job to the state where we can bill for it, to clean up 
the mess left from our mistakes last year, whatever  I've known a 
couple guys, my father included, who, long after the corporation had 
done a chapter 7, were still paying off loans they'd signed for back 
when they thought they just needed to chase the wolf away from the door 
for a little longer and things would be OK.




But
investment can still be managed, if you have something you are doing
that is or might be making money. Many of these here assume that this
product is Orbo. It might not be, not exactly. It might be peeks at
Orbo. And if you don't do anything to seriously upset those who have
signed the NDA, the cat doesn't get to jump out of the bag.

Thanks for your signing the agreement and for your confidence in us as
represented by your $400 payment. As soon as that payment clears, you
will get an access code to look at our full disclosure of everything.
Let us know what you think when you have looked at it.

I'm sorry that you were disappointed in our disclosure. Is there
anything there that was contrary to your reasonable expectations?
However, we don't want anyone to be disappointed. We require developers
to take 30 days to fully review and do not accept termination requests
during that period. However, if, after that, you wish to withdraw from
being a developer, please let us know within the following 30 days and
we will provide to you the termination agreement; upon your signature on
that, we will refund your payment in full.

As you have provided your signature on the document, your refund will
be issued within 60 days as provided in the termination agreement. Thank
you for your interest in Orbo. We remind you that all details that were
disclosed to you remain completely confidential, and we vigorously
enforce the non-disclosure agreement, because confidentiality is the
core of necessity at this point.


:-)

I wouldn't be surprised if you're right.

OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if most investors decide to stay in the pot 
rather than pulling out.





But as part of the termination process, they offer an opportunity to
become an investor with the money, and they give incentives. The
language is such that it appears they are offering investment in the
technology, but they make sure that it's pointed out to the mark that
even if the technology doesn't work out, because of the basic laws of
physics or other nonsense, the now-investor may still make money, and
good money. Yes, absolutely, it's a Ponzi scheme


I don't think so; not as you described it.  Only if investors get out 
more than they put in is it a Ponzi scheme.  Otherwise it's just 
scrambling for new investor dollars to replace the old ones who got cold 
feet, the same way all companies without income must do.


A Ponzi scheme is specifically a scheme for allowing *investors* to make 
money even though the company has no source of income.  It's the lure of 
assured high return on the money which pulls in the investors.  In 
particular, investors who pull out before a Ponzi scheme collapses make 
a profit.   The (very plausible) scheme you describe doesn't earn 
anything at all for investors which pull out; they just break even.  The 
*only* winners are salaried employees.


That's just business as usual in the startup world -- save that in an 
honest startup, when things start to go sour, the officers often stop 
drawing salaries, in an effort to bolster cash flow...





With this device, they have attracted people who might be inclined to
believe that over-unity is possible, otherwise they wouldn't bother
(other than sheer curiosity, which may trap a few cats as well). If the
Orbo investigation is sophisicated enough, the physics of it might be
fun. Some people might keep their money in just for that.

It's been said that I'm making assumptions. Sure, but probably
reasonable ones. However, don't mistake my speculations as to what might
be under the NDA covers with assumptions that this is what they are
doing. I'm merely pointing out that, from what we see, a very clever and
sophisticated and legal scam

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-19 Thread Harry Veeder

Mongo is right.

harry

- Original Message 
 From: OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson orionwo...@charter.net
 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
 Sent: Sat, December 19, 2009 7:10:47 PM
 Subject: RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

 Abd sez:

  Mongo want to see a light bulb real soon.

  No light bulb soon, Mongo send candygram to Sean.

  Light bulb! Light bulb! Light bulb!

  Steorn response simple: light bulb. Lights up. What does that mean?

 Mongo sez: 

 Abd not serious! Even Mongo KNOWS what Light bulb means!

 [And then, during another rare pensive moment, Mongo adds:]

 Mongo not sure Abd knows what light bulb means.

 Regards

 Steven Vincent Johnson
 www.OrionWorks.com
 www.zazzle.com/orionworks 

  __
Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer® 8. 
Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at 
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Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 10:56 PM 12/19/2009, you wrote:
A Ponzi scheme is specifically a scheme for allowing *investors* to 
make money even though the company has no source of income.  It's 
the lure of assured high return on the money which pulls in the 
investors.  In particular, investors who pull out before a Ponzi 
scheme collapses make a profit.   The (very plausible) scheme you 
describe doesn't earn anything at all for investors which pull out; 
they just break even.  The *only* winners are salaried employees.


That's just business as usual in the startup world -- save that in 
an honest startup, when things start to go sour, the officers often 
stop drawing salaries, in an effort to bolster cash flow...


I wrote that it's a Ponzi scheme as an analogy, not as a literal 
Ponzi scheme. I've also called Wikipedia a Ponzi or pyramid scheme.


Steorn has a source of income: those who pay for access to the 
technology. That, in fact, is their core business plan, and they have 
disclaimed any interest in making Orbo products. They also have 
products: stuff used to test Orbo (or maybe other magnetic devices).


I've been reading over the history. Remarkable.

There are a lot of details, if you read between the lines. For 
example, very low-friction bearings are crucial to the technology; 
they are offering them and they make this statement about them. Now, 
what does that imply? It implies that if there is any excess energy 
here, it is very low, and that ordinary bearings aren't good enough. 
The 2007 demonstration allegedly failed because the special 
low-friction bearings got fried.


Now, if they believe that they have found some anomaly, they may also 
know that the anomaly is clearly small. Any attempt to extract energy 
from the rotor, of course, will act to slow down the rotor more than 
an ordinary bearing would, so what this implies is that they haven't 
succeeded in scaling up the effect they see or imagine.


And that, then, explains their business plan. They aren't going to 
market practical devices. They are only selling licenses. So if they 
can convince someone that the anomaly is worth researching, they make 
their money selling the technology to produce the anomaly, as well as 
bearings, hall sensors, and torque measurement equipment. Never mind 
if it's totally impossible to scale it up, whether because it is 
actually non-existent, is some kind of artifact, or even if it 
exists. Scaling up cold fusion, as an example, even though the 
reactions are clearly real, is an entirely different problem, and 
solving it is really where the money will be, if that happens.


Steorn may well know that scaling up is extremely difficult, that is, 
they do know the effect is very small, or they would not be stating 
how important ultra low friction bearings are to Orbo.


And then that means that when they talk enthusiastically about 
applications, powering cars with Orbo, etc., they are truly blowing 
smoke, pure speculation. And if you read the licensing info that they 
have, you'll discover that a whole series of applications aren't 
available for commercial licensing, including automotive 
applications. If you become a developer, the cheapest license, 
apparently, you gain no rights at all, you can't market what you 
develop. Interesting model, if I've read it right.


So: they ask for a scientific jury, they get, they claim, a thousand 
applications, they send out contracts to a few and end up with over 
twenty scientist for the jury. There is some rumor I came across that 
Michael McKubre was on the jury


And then, after something like three years, the jury announces that 
it is quitting, that Steorn had not shown any evidence of energy 
production. And Steorn doesn't exactly announce that. They announce 
that they understand why the members of the jury were frustrated, 
but now Steorn has solved the problems and will be going ahead. And 
then they use this jury that they picked in their ad, lumping it in 
with knee-jerk rejection. It's highly deceptive.


Today there was a talk by Sean on the technology and the 
demonstration. He showed an oscilloscope display of the coil voltage 
and current, and claimed that the traces showed the absence of back 
EMF, and that therefore all the battery power was going into Joule 
heating, and that therefore the rotation was entirely free energy. 
There is an immediate YouTube rebuttal up that shows another motor, 
similar concept, with a hall sensor that pulses the coil voltage, and 
he showed that the lack of variation of voltage and current with 
rotor velocity was totally normal for a pulse motor.


In other words, the demonstration, even with some instrumentation, 
was pure smoke.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence




On 12/18/2009 01:34 AM, Esa Ruoho wrote:

Rick always writes what he means and means what he says. He's the guy
who sells the Bedini kits, there's a 10 coil monopole kit that they
have released, for instance. http://rpmgt.org/order.html
The Bedini Monopole Energizer kit was built by a friend and he came to
the conclusion that it's only for learning-purposes, and can be taken
further (it's possible that mr. Friedrich has upped his ante and knows
and understands more about the Bedini monopole tech - and that the
10-pole energizer would be quite worth looking into. But at that
price? Not sure how much machining something like that would cost, but
they mention it'd be in the tens of thousands of usd?  on the page..)
Rick also features on the Energy From The Vacuum series as a spectator
of Bedini showing his stuff, I think in EFTV12 perchance. The detail
here that (I guess) matters, is that Bedini chose Friedrich to make
the kits available via, and Friedrich also sells the Renaissance
charger devices,


The Renaissance gadgets are more or less legit, I think, BTW, but they 
depend pretty heavily on the odd properties of lead-acid batteries to 
get their effect.


For that matter, the Bedini kits are legit, too, if I can judge by what 
I've read about them -- you pay some money, build a little motor, and 
have a lot of fun with it.  What more can you ask?  Connect it to a 
battery, and it goes around.  Lots of people sell kits of that sort, and 
lots of people buy them and have a blast fiddling with them.  What's 
even better, his motors are weird, which means you get to spend hours 
playing with it, trying to figure out what it's really doing, and how it 
does it; that's a lot more money's worth than you get out of a 
conventional wind-your-own motor kit from an educational supply house.


It won't get you off the Grid but then neither will a bag o' motors 
from Edmund Scientific.




and has relations to Bedini's EnergenX -company. It's
not a random guy shooting the breeze on a mailinglist, if I'm not
completely mistaken, Friedrich maintains some of the monopole lists
and is in general a guy who would know what Bedini is up to, and
what's next.
Looking at what Friedrich wrote about 1/3 of the amps going into the
secondary - he is quite probably talking about the secondary batteries
that get charged while the primary batteries provide the juice for the
transformation process.


That doesn't make sense either, though.  If he's pulling A amps from 
the primaries on a continuous basis, and putting A/3 amps into the 
secondaries, the system's got to run down rather quickly.


Unless, of course, there's something very special about the batteries, 
or about the charging method -- but that would be quite independent of 
any interesting properties of the motor itself.


Or is he using three batteries at each end, with the primaries wired in 
parallel and the secondaries wired in series, and 3x voltage 
multiplication in the middle?





On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 7:45 PM, Stephen A. Lawrencesa...@pobox.com  wrote:



On 12/16/2009 12:07 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:


At 11:00 AM 12/16/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:


No he didn't.  Esa Ruoho quoted rickfriedrich from the bedini_monopole_3
forum.  It was Rick who was experimenting with the Bedini motor described
here, not Esa, and AFAIK Rick isn't on Vortex.

Rick's batteries are apparently magic, if I understood this quote; he says a
good number of amps were constantly being drawn [from the batteries?]
but the batteries remained charged; I don't understand that.  He must have
meant something other than how I interpreted his words.

I was running the system on smaller used batteries for days and they
remained charged even though a good number of amps were constantly
being drawn and the meter was showing 1/3rd of the amps going back
into the secondary.

Take a hint. Fine to set it up and start it with batteries, but
batteries are tricky to monitor, they don't easily show the exact state
of the charge. Put together a capacitor bank with enough depth (farads)
to cover the draw phase, and charge it up to the battery voltage. Then
once you are running, take the battery out of the circuit. You can then
directly monitor the power storage by monitoring the capacitor voltage.
No guessing. You will know right away if you are over unity, and how
much, or, if you are under unity, exactly how much you are under unity.

The larger the capacitance, the more even the available voltage will be.
I'd think of making it really large, so you would not want to directly
connect the battery to the capacitor, that can melt wires! You'd charge
through a resistor. You could make all this part of one circuit, with a
switch on the battery, or you could eliminate the battery and use a
power supply which you then, once the thing is running, disconnect.

Unless, of course, you want a demonstration that looks reasonably good
through the idea that a battery couldn't possible last this long. As
another

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

According to one of my latest Google news alerts Steorn just made CNN
news. However, I can't seem to find the link anywhere on cnn's web
site.

Does anyone know anything about this?

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Abd ul-Rahman Lomax


At 12:11 AM 12/17/2009, William Beaty wrote:

7. It's NOT the company's number one goal to prove that the invention is
  real. The scam company seems to have no goal besides creating an aura of
  attractive secrets: secrets which will only be revealed to an in-group
  of superior blue-blooded investors, while we rabble on the outside are
  obviously inferior since we haven't invested and don't know the secrets.
  (It's the old treasure map trick, playing to your victim's self-
  importance.) Scamsters have all sorts of other tricks to appeal to
  snobbery or play up to the egos of investors. They also have many really
  sensible excuses for not proving that their discovery is real. But
  honest companies just sit down and prove their claims beyond any doubt
  BEFORE gathering investors. After all, its unethical to take investors'
  money for extremely questionable and totally unproven devices as if
  they were normal inventions developed by reliable companies.

I wrote that, when?  Late 2005?  Was that before Steorn's stuff?


I don't know and don't really care. It's right on.

It can happen that a legitimate new invention or discovery can look 
like a scam operation. In fact, scammers certainly take full 
advantage of that, and will remind us of it over and over, they use 
it as part of the smokescreen.


With Steorn, though, the string of coincidences involved has come to 
the point where there really isn't any other reasonable hypothesis 
except scam.


Probably half or more of those writing here thought of using a 
capacitor. So, okay, supposed they need to get this thing going with 
some stored energy. That's completely reasonable. Now, if this is to 
be a demonstration of an over-unity device, as distinct from a teaser 
that really shows nothing at all except some alleged elements of the 
technology, they would know completely that the battery has to go. 
Fine. Start with a battery, but parallel a supercapacitor, and then 
pull the battery. The supercapacitor will behave as a very efficient 
battery, right? But with no complicated internal chemistry where 
complications lurk. And then there would be a simple device added: a 
voltmeter across the battery. The webcam would show the voltage.


No demonstration alone would prove this wasn't a scam, it's obvious 
that there are more ways to fake a demonstration than to discover the 
fakes just by simple, hands-off observation. A real demonstration 
must be repeatable to be most convincing, repeatable simply by the 
transmission of detailed plans. Again, there are possible 
complications. What if the inventor has unconsciously done something 
that doesn't get documented? That makes it work? This happens, out of 
sheer luck or out of intuition. But Beaty has put his finger on the 
critical difference between an inventor working with a difficult 
technology and a scammer: transparency, honesty, open disclosure, and 
there are ways of obtaining independent confirmation without risking 
loss of what might, indeed, prudently remain secret for a time.


Steorn isn't doing that. Instead, they are putting their energy into 
a scheme that would raise money for them whether the technology works 
or not. They are charging for a peek at the technology. This, then, 
depends on their ability to manipulate media to generate publicity. 
And the fact that so many mails here are discussing this ersatz 
demonstration shows that they are succeeding.


The NDAs are really the proof. The NDAs are radically 
over-restrictive, requiring secrecy on far more than necessary. Why 
would the text of the NDA be, itself, a secret? Obviously, people see 
that text before signing the NDA, though possibly they sign a pre-NDA 
requiring them to keep the NDA text secret. That pre-NDA text would 
still not be covered by the NDA, because it has to be revealed to 
people who haven't signed yet. Okay, Hoyt, what can you tell us? How 
did the NDA work? What was revealed to you before you signed?


What a legitimate inventor would tell us, as soon as possible, why 
the inventor believes that the thing works, or will work when better 
engineered. Steorn is talking about an effect, and, indeed, they 
disclaim interest in selling practical devices. That takes a away a 
lot of burden! However, it means that, in order to make a profit, 
they will need to sell the idea itself; what is the basis for 
believing that there is a particular way to wave the magnetic magic 
wand to get some energy to pop out of a hat of coils? A simple 
demonstration of even the smallest -- but measurable -- effect? And 
if they don't have that, they have *nothing* but a wild idea, the 
kind of thing that is easily based on an error in their analysis.


And they've been at this for years. How many people have signed NDAs? 
How many of those are convinced? Why would such data be inaccessible?


Keeping information like that secret can certainly be justified by 
the raw self-interest of Steorn. But all this secrecy simply

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

From Stephen Lawrence

...

 ... But he's [MADOFF] **NOT** held up as an example of a
 successful con artist, because he (a) had no exit strategy, ...


Ok, then then what's Steorn's exit strategy?

The whole Storn group (at the correct strategic moment) buys
themselves one-way tickets to the Camen islands? Nigeria??? ;-)


Sean, the 3rd: And what did you do gramps?

Sean: Well, grandson, I bilked a lot of gullible people out of
millions by staging a sophisticated hoax in at attempt to prove to a
bunch of idiots that it's possible to extract blood from a turnip.
Enough of these dimwits fell for it that I was able to accumulate a
tidy little nest egg for my retirement years, and, oh by the way, fund
your college education. So, my grandson, what do you plan on studying
when you go to college?

Sean, the 3rd: Why, marketing, of course!

Sean: Good boy!, now go get me a mint julep, please.

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Abd ul-Rahman Lomax


At 10:10 PM 12/17/2009, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:

Abd remarks,
[...]
 What I do claim is that the Steorn situation bears very strong marks
 of being a con, a fairly sophisticated one, where they are
 deliberately setting up demonstrations with obvious flaws, which they
 can then remedy, setting up the rebound effect.

You may recall that I also recently voiced similar speculation. I also
speculated that STEORN is deliberately attempting to lead all the skeptics
and debunkers down to the slaughter house where at the right moment they
will all get wacked on the head. Very calculated... Very dramatic.


Yes. Noted.


However,
in my scenario, I seem to have come to a different conclusion. It seems more
plausible for me to speculate that Steorn actually believes that their ORBO
device is for real. IOW, I don't yet buy the premise that it's a con job.


I don't think you are considering the implications of that apparent 
set-up sufficiently. The premise isn't an assumption, it's a 
conclusion, from the consistency of the smoke-screen. Instead of 
looking for the fire, look for smoke! Why is so much smoke being 
generated? Demonstrations that don't demonstrate? That don't even 
attempt to demonstrate, at least at first. It's a show, not a demonstration.



OF course, under my scenario it's quite possible that the Steorn engineers
have deluded themselves.


Sure. Or some of them are deluded and some are not, some are in. But 
I have another hypothesis.



Please understand, I remain highly skeptical of Steorn's claims. Like
everyone here, I demand definitive evidence and am disappointed that Steorn
has not yet delivered on that point. Nevertheless I'm having a difficult
time perceiving how this con game you have described could possibly
benefit Steorn. If this is all nothing more than a deliberate (albeit
sophisticated) con game then it's all a house of cards and they will
eventually get caught. There's no way around the fact that they would
eventually get caught. The village will rise up in arms with pitchforks they
and torches in hand and run them all out of town, that is after they are
tarred and feathered and sent to the slammer. Granted, I could be wrong but
I really, REALLY have a difficult time believing they could be that stupid
as to believe they could pull off such a con job on the public, not with the
amount of constant scrutiny they are receiving.


Yet it appears to be working, Steven. You are making assumptions 
about how they will proceed, and, also, assumptions about what is 
involved in the NDAs.



When do they get to eat their cake? More to the point, how can they get to
the cake without getting the heads cut off?


They are already eating the cake, for some years now, and the cake 
continues to be baked and served to them as long as there is positive 
cash flow, which there may be. And when the cash flow goes negative, 
the corporation goes bust, and those who collected salaries keep the 
money. And the directors may be on the hook if there are burned 
creditors, but they could easily arrange that the corporation closes 
down without doing that. They pay their bills, it's that simple, the 
directors make sure that this happens, but they are not required 
legally to ensure success, and, I'm quite sure that the investors, 
who will be the real losers, are themselves involved in agreements 
that protect the personal property of Steorn officers and employees.


The Developer agreement is quite well-laced with clauses that 
disclaim any claims of functionality.


You imagine that they would be tarred and feathered and jailed. Okay, 
jailed. What would be the charge? Deceiving the public? But that is 
not generally a crime, and magicians do it all the time. Deceiving 
people who purchase the right to see the technology? Without knowing 
the NDA contents, it's difficult to know that there has been any 
deception of these people at all. As one extreme, what you get when 
you sign the NDA is a disclosure that there is this idea that might 
result in over unity power, but that they haven't proven it yet, they 
are working on it. Or perhaps there is a disclosure that it's all for 
show, and if you reveal that, well, you will be sued. They gave you 
what you paid for, the secret.


Perhaps they offer your money back. Why wouldn't you go for that? 
Well, there is a kicker: if you don't ask for your money back, you 
will get a cut of all the new sales of disclosure agreements. They 
can refund the money, they can keep it for long enough that the 
interest on it will cover their expenses of refund. The agreement the 
person signed allows them delay in refund. And they perform on the 
agreement until they can't. When they can't, the thing will collapse, 
and so their game is to see how long they can keep it going. When it 
collapses, sorry, you have an agreement with a defunct corporation, 
and you are last in line. Employees get paid first, you know. As I 
mentioned, the board may act to

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

From Abd:

...

 Yet it appears to be working, Steven. You are making
 assumptions about how they will proceed, and, also,
 assumptions about what is involved in the NDAs.

Of course I'm making lots of assumptions. Some of them may even
stretch the sensibilities of Occam's Razor. Guilty as charged.

And you haven't any assumptions? I lost count.

It often seems to me that many of your explanations tend to be
extremely long, verbose, and exquisitely complex in their
machinations. Quite ingenious, most of them, actually. (PLEASE NOTE:
THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM OF YOUR DEDUCTIVE PROCESS!) Nevertheless, it's
been my experience that being gifted with an IQ of +140 as well as the
gift of good grammar (a talent that has taken me decades to cultivate
to the barest limited degree of acceptability) does not necessarily
mean the fruits of a stratospheric IQ is anymore capable of generating
realistic assumptions that are any more in-tune than those of Mongo's,
who learns a valuable lesson after opening a special delivery box of
candy.

Let me respond to only one small portion of a few assumptions you have
made... that appear to be based on one of my assumptions:

 You imagine that they would be tarred and feathered
 and jailed. Okay, jailed. What would be the charge?
 Deceiving the public? But that is not generally a
 crime, and magicians do it all the time. Deceiving
 people who purchase the right to see the technology?
 Without knowing the NDA contents, it's difficult to
 know that there has been any deception of these
 people at all. As one extreme, what you get when
 you sign the NDA is a disclosure that there is this
 idea that might result in over unity power, but that
 they haven't proven it yet, they are working on it.
 Or perhaps there is a disclosure that it's all for
 show, and if you reveal that, well, you will be
 sued. They gave you what you paid for, the secret.

Yes, Mongo still find way to jail them. Mongo see lots of other Mongos
out there too. We all unhappy too. We all find way to jail them all.
Lose key, too! Hee hee.

Mongo then go to candy store and buy OWN box of candy.

 But I don't see any evidence that they actually have something.

Strange as it might seem for me to say this at the moment:

Mongo agrees. Mongo looking for special delivery boxes. Mongo curious
to see who gets them. Mongo want to watch, from a distance.

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Abd ul-Rahman Lomax


At 11:20 AM 12/18/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:

From Stephen Lawrence
 ... But he's [MADOFF] **NOT** held up as an example of a
 successful con artist, because he (a) had no exit strategy, ...

Ok, then then what's Steorn's exit strategy?


I certainly don't know for sure. Depends on how greedy they are. Get 
too greedy, they end up in jail or fugitives.


But if they stay short of that, the exit strategy is that Steorn 
shuts down. The creditors are paid. Those who invested early on have 
made more than their money back. Those who invested toward the end 
may lose their investment. Standard, think of it as being similar to 
those who buy stock in a company that is about to go under. If there 
were refund provisions in the purchase agreement, they may get their 
investment back, but if they waived the refund in order to gain 
participation and payments as long as it lasts, well, they lose. And 
their money is where the earlier investor profits came from, it we 
look at it passed down the line.


The payments out would depend on income from payments. So if the 
income collapsed, so do any payment obligations. As long as they keep 
reserves for any debts and contractual payments that are fixed, 
they'll be okay legally.


That's an exit strategy.

It's possible that they will never admit that it was a shell game. 
Eventually, someone will break an NDA. But it might be a long time 
before we find out what happened with certainty.



The whole Storn group (at the correct strategic moment) buys
themselves one-way tickets to the Camen islands? Nigeria??? ;-)


Nah. That's a naive exit strategy. The people running Steorn can walk 
away with less money, but also greatly reduced risk. They merely need 
confine the sheep to a carefully selected group that they shear, and 
one that is informed about the risk, but simply neglects that as 
unlikely to fall down, or just wants to gamble.Sean, the 3rd: And 
what did you do gramps?



Sean: Well, grandson, I bilked a lot of gullible people out of
millions by staging a sophisticated hoax in at attempt to prove to a
bunch of idiots that it's possible to extract blood from a turnip.
Enough of these dimwits fell for it that I was able to accumulate a
tidy little nest egg for my retirement years, and, oh by the way, fund
your college education. So, my grandson, what do you plan on studying
when you go to college?

Sean, the 3rd: Why, marketing, of course!


You got it, actually. However, bilked may not be it. Rather, he set 
up a speculative investment opportunity for people, under this 
particular theory: now that you know we don't actually have anything 
yet -- we might find the magic wand waving technique! but, you know, 
those stupid physicists say it's impossible -- you have the option of 
leaving your money in, and as long as our research program can stay 
open, you'll get payments from the new people buying in. So you can 
make some money, if it lasts long enough. If it doesn't, well, there 
is always risk in investment. We hope you will continue to study the 
information we sent you, and perhaps work on modifications that might 
find the necessary improvements, but, if not, you can still make a 
profit. Our early investors have made 150% profit over a few years. 
If you'd like out, now, you may request your refund, it will be 
processed and refunded within a month. By the way, your nondisclosure 
agreement continues to apply according to its terms. What has been 
revealed to you must be kept in strictest confidence, I'm sure you 
can understand why.


I'd call it clever, in fact. But I don't know that this is the actual 
plan. It is merely a possible one that includes an exit strategy and 
which explains just about everything except precisely how this got 
started, which isn't that important. It may have begun with some 
sincere investigation of an idea. But it didn't stay that way, they 
found an opportunity and took it and ran with it.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence




On 12/18/2009 01:53 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 10:10 PM 12/17/2009, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:





When do they get to eat their cake? More to the point, how can they
get to
the cake without getting the heads cut off?


They are already eating the cake, for some years now, and the cake
continues to be baked and served to them as long as there is positive
cash flow, which there may be. And when the cash flow goes negative, the
corporation goes bust, and those who collected salaries keep the money.
And the directors may be on the hook if there are burned creditors, but
they could easily arrange that the corporation closes down without doing
that. They pay their bills, it's that simple, the directors make sure
that this happens, but they are not required legally to ensure success,
and, I'm quite sure that the investors, who will be the real losers, are
themselves involved in agreements that protect the personal property of
Steorn officers and employees.

The Developer agreement is quite well-laced with clauses that disclaim
any claims of functionality.


Absolutely.  I agree completely.  The officers are golden, unless 
they've done something foolish like lie to their investors with regard 
to something material, like how much money the company has in the bank.


BTW, anybody know where Steorn is incorporated?  I don't suppose it's 
Delaware, USA?  (Don't guffaw too much, just because they're an Irish 
company -- for years I worked for a tiny Danish company, with corporate 
headquarters in California, which was incorporated in Delaware; but all 
the real work was done in Massachusetts.  And they weren't even trying 
to do anything sleazy.  It's a weird world out there.)


Just a couple nits:

-- I think it's unlikely that they're cash positive right now, if we 
leave cash flow from stock sales off the balance sheet.  But, that 
doesn't really matter much; with repeated rounds of financing, companies 
can go for years in a cash-negative, money-losing state.


-- In the United States, the directors won't generally be on the hook 
whether or not they leave a trail of burned creditors.  If the creditors 
are stupid enough to let a free-energy company go for months without 
paying a bill, they get what they deserve, and what they deserve from 
an incorporated entity that goes bust is a few cents on the dollar.  The 
only funds in the pot which can be touched are funds owned by the 
corporate entity.


-- Also in the United States, there is one creditor which *does* matter: 
 The U.S. government.  A quick way to boost cash flow is to forget to 
pony up the company's share of social security payments.  This 
occasionally results in company officers going to jail shortly after the 
roof finally falls in.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence




On 12/18/2009 02:31 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 11:02 PM 12/17/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:



Sounds good. But magicians don't usually start by working to convince
everyone that they are incompetent liars. That's a label nobody wants
to start with.


I have experienced the exact opposite. They are very good at starting
with that label, they amplify it and play with it.


Eh, hold on -- they do it for a few seconds, a few minutes, perhaps more 
than a few minutes.  They patter away, with an ace of hearts glued to 
the back of their jacket where all can see it, or whatever.


But very soon, far sooner than the timeout after which the audience 
leaves in disgust, they do something which reveals they are monumentally 
clever after all.


Imagine, instead, a magic show where the magicians did nothing but show 
tricks that didn't work, or do slight of hand where all could see the 
hidden card on the back of the hand, or attempted to juggle but dropped 
the balls -- imagine that they did this for the ENTIRE FIRST HALF of the 
show.


Then there's the intermission.

Then, only after the intermission, they show that they can really pull 
off some fine stunts.


Only problem -- the hall's kind of empty at that point, because an awful 
lot of folks didn't come back after the break.


That would be a show where the magician started by CONVINCING the 
audience that he was an incompetent liar.


It's been more than seconds, minutes, days -- it's been years -- Steorn 
has yet to show the clever part.  All they've shown is the boobery.


...


Sure, sure, sure. The bit about magicians is all true. But what makes
you think that Steorn fills the bill of a skilled magician? What
EVIDENCE is there that anyone at Steorn is competent to pull off any
kind of convincing demo of anything?


The level of competence required for the convincing demo -- if we
allow actual fraud -- is low. I'm sure I could build it, just give me a
little money.


Hah!  Indeed, I'm absolutely sure you could.  But, you're not an 
average Joe off the street.  What makes you think anybody at Steorn is 
as competent as you?  Your definition of a low level of competence 
probably doesn't match most folks'.


I'm serious here.  I have seen no evidence of such competence at Steorn. 
 In the absence of such evidence, I see no reason to believe it's present.


Assuming incompetence is all staged, and that more apparent 
incompetence just proves it's staged better -- well, it's an 
assumption, and I can't really see any reason for retaining it.


...




But this argument of ours will be entirely moot in short order, when
we see how this absurd non-demo plays out in its final weeks.


I don't think so: so there must be our bet. I bet it won't be resolved
in a few weeks. I don't see that they are anywhere near the necessity of
closing down and cashing out. So my bet would be on continued murkiness
and mystery, that's what my theory predicts.


Oh, I agree that Steorn's fate won't be resolved.  They are extremely 
competent at explaining away problems, at drawing things out, and at 
staying in business, and I'm sure they will continue to do such things. 
 What I think *will* be resolved is the question of whether they're 
just teasing us with this wretchedly awful demonstration, in preparation 
for rolling out something far better some time in the very near future.


The bet I would make is this:

The current demo will continue to be of horribly low quality, and there 
will be no deus ex machina which suddenly makes their machines run 
better.  Not now, and not any time in the next few months.


If I've understood what you have said previously, you think the 
opposite; you expect them to pull a better rabbit from the hat, and 
suddenly upgrade their machines to something which will stymie their 
critics.


*  *  *

In other words, I will go on record as stating that the current wretched 
demo, as it currently exists, is the *best* *they* *can* *do*, or very 
close to it.  Consequently, we will not see anything better before the 
scheduled end of this demonstration, and we will not see anything 
substantially better in the coming, say, six months, either -- let us 
say, before June.


And *that* assertion -- that nothing better will be forthcoming -- is 
what will be either proved to be true, or disproved, in relatively short 
order.


I really believe that if they had anything better they would already 
have rolled it out (but of course, what they have but aren't showing is 
something we won't know for a long time, if ever).

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

From Stephen Lawrence:

...

 ... Oh, I agree that Steorn's fate won't be resolved.

Mongo [in a rare moment of pensive self-reflection] tends to disagree.

Mongo want to see a light bulb real soon.

No light bulb soon, Mongo send candygram to Sean.

Light bulb! Light bulb! Light bulb!

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-18 Thread Terry Blanton

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote:

 BTW, anybody know where Steorn is incorporated?

From:

http://www.steorn.com/about/disclaimer/

Steorn Limited, Unit 18, Docklands Innovation Park, East Wall Rd,
Dublin 3, Ireland, a limited liability company incorporated in Ireland
with registered number 330508.

Terry

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread Terry Blanton

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:11 AM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote:

 I wrote that, when?  Late 2005?  Was that before Steorn's stuff?

Yes, their claim surfaced in late 2006.

Terry

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread Jed Rothwell


William Beaty wrote:


Was flying machine plagued constantly by con artists taking money from
enormous numbers of people?


Well, not enormous numbers, but there were quite a few. Enough to 
cause the Wright brothers many problems because, for example, U.S. 
Army officials assumed they were con artists. In France up until the 
moment of the demonstration they were called con artists and bluffers.


I have accounts from as late as 1912 that in U.S. cities and towns, 
aviators would sometimes show up on the train to do a flight 
exhibition (with the airplane in crates), and they would  be met by 
angry crowds and the sheriff ready to arrest them because everyone 
knows people can't fly. This was after the Wrights had become world 
famous. Many people did not believe the newspapers, and they 
emphatically did not believe scientists and engineers. The same is 
true today. Many politicians make hay claiming the evolution, global 
warming, Hubbert's peak and other technical issues are a left-wing 
conspiracy, or something like that.



I.e. was it akin to lead-into-gold alchemist research, or 
known-shady used car dealerships?  Did wise investors have to assume 
a scam was in progress until innocence was proven?


Yes, they did. The company that finally invested in the airplane, the 
Charles Flint company, sent experts to confirm the claims. They would 
have been foolish not to.


With the spread of the technology, the con artists began to fade 
away, by they were replaced by many people who tried to steal the 
technology and claim they invented the airplane first. The 
Smithsonian, the Scientific American and others played fast and loose 
with the truth for political reasons. The Sci. Am. continues to do 
that today, denigrating the Wrights and lying about history as 
recently as 2003.


- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread Jed Rothwell


I wrote:

Well, not enormous numbers, but there were quite a few. Enough to 
cause the Wright brothers many problems because, for example, U.S. 
Army officials assumed they were con artists.


An even bigger problem was incompetent wannabee aviators, especially 
Langley (Smithsonian) and Ferber (French Army). Langley spent $50,000 
of Federal money and crashed into the Potomac twice, in 1903, a few 
weeks before the Wrights flew. The mass media derided this and 
ridiculed other attempts to fly. The Army was reluctant to deal with 
the Wrights years later because of the Langley fiasco.


Langley died in 1906. In 1909 they gave out the first Langley medal, 
to the Wrights, and later they named an airport after him. Langley 
was a pioneer and he had some redeeming features, but all in all, I 
think he was a vindictive jerk who made serious technical errors, 
held back progress in aviation, and nearly killed his pilot, Manley, twice.


Needless to say, incompetent and dishonest people have caused much 
harm in over-unity energy research, cold fusion and related fields. 
It is not fair to hold Prof. A at fault because Prof. B makes a dumb 
mistake, but people tend to tar them with the same brush. The 
attitude is that a mistake by cold fusion researcher is a mistake by 
all. They don't often say this about plasma fusion researchers or 
doctors. On the other hand, I guess that is what they are saying 
about climate research, in this so-called Climate-gate scandal.


There is another interesting parallel to cold fusion. Langley's 
failure, and ones similar to it, were widely taken as proof that man 
cannot fly and anyone who tries is an impractical ivory tower 
scientist. There were many popular culture poems and ditties about 
foolish people trying to fly (Darius Green and His Flying Machine), 
and expressions like you can no more do that than you can fly! They 
did just mean flap your arms; this was a popular culture reference to 
building an airplane. Bear in mind that people had been doing that 
since the late 1700s, often killing themselves. Flying was the cliche 
(or watchword) for an impossible or ridiculous venture. Most 
Americans regarded the flying machine as little more than a chimera 
pursued by foolish dreamers (T. Crouch, A Dream of Wings.) 
Nowadays, of course, people use cold fusion to mean the same thing.


The thing is, people back in 1903 took that cliche literately. They 
did not realize that Pilcher, Lilienthal, Chanute and others had 
actually glided with considerable success. That was odd because 
Lilienthal was famous worldwide and there were many photos of him in 
newspapers. He flew hundreds of times before crashing and killing 
himself in 1896. I wonder if newspaper readers imagined that he was 
killed in the first attempt, and never succeeded at all. Technically 
knowledgeable people understood that flight was difficult, but 
because of the cliche, some of them overestimated the difficulties, 
and did not bother to look for a solution. This attitude even 
infected the Wrights. On the way home from Kitty Hawk after a 
discouraging season of flight tests in 1901, Orville said man will 
not fly for 50 years.


- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread William Beaty

On Thu, 17 Dec 2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
 Needless to say, incompetent and dishonest people have caused much
 harm in over-unity energy research, cold fusion and related fields.
 It is not fair to hold Prof. A at fault because Prof. B makes a dumb
 mistake, but people tend to tar them with the same brush. The
 attitude is that a mistake by cold fusion researcher is a mistake by
 all. They don't often say this about plasma fusion researchers or
 doctors. On the other hand, I guess that is what they are saying
 about climate research, in this so-called Climate-gate scandal.

I once saw reference to the Curies being terrified of attracting
the perpetual motion label, and being relieved when it didn't occur.
But this was in some online article, and I've not seen such a thing
mentioned in the two biographies I've read.  If things went a bit
differently, the Curies could have faced the same barriers as
the Wrights.

 Americans regarded the flying machine as little more than a chimera
 pursued by foolish dreamers (T. Crouch, A Dream of Wings.)
 Nowadays, of course, people use cold fusion to mean the same thing.

And today if you mention that flying machines were long ridiculed, people
get angry and insist that no such thing could have happened.  I expect
that if CF starts being sold as products, 'Skeptics' will conveniently
forget the history of ridicule.  Perhaps we should congratulate Park and
crew for actually publishing books.  Imagine if CF supporters could point
to a crop of specifically anti-Wright bros books, anti-spaceflight books,
etc.   All we have is embarrassing quotes from famous astronomers.



(( ( (  (   ((O))   )  ) ) )))
William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 02:25 PM 12/16/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Let me repeat, I am playing devil's advocate here. I do not 
seriously believe these claims. On the other hand, there have been 
several magic magnetic motor claims over the years and I am not 
quite ready to dismiss them all.


I'm not making a general claim about magic motors. Though I have 
high skepticism that someone is going to find the magic combination 
of magnetic fields and timing and all that in order to change the 
very seriously verified understanding of conservation of energy, i.e. 
that you don't get gains by playing a shell game with fields and 
configurations, you only get greater or lesser losses.


This is entirely different from low energy nuclear reactions, which 
don't involve such contradictions with fundamental and extremely-well 
known theory (because there is no violation involved in unknown 
catalysis, for example, that allows bypass of the coulomb barrier -- 
such as muons, supposing that hadn't been observed before). It's 
entirely different from some device that taps zero point energy, 
there is no hint of ZPE effects on magnetic fields and forces at the 
levels involved, etc.


It's an energy shell game, almost certainly, and that game can fool 
the players, so I don't reject the sincerity of people who claim 
magic motors, I merely note that when they get serious and manage to 
get some funding, they are sometimes forced into a situation where 
fraud does arise.


What I do claim is that the Steorn situation bears very strong marks 
of being a con, a fairly sophisticated one, where they are 
deliberately setting up demonstrations with obvious flaws, which they 
can then remedy, setting up the rebound effect.


I.e., people will make charges against Steorn, such as charges that 
the batteries are running the thing, etc. And so then they remove the 
batteries, and it still runs, and then their explanation that the 
batteries were just for blah, blah, previously seen as preposterous, 
suddenly looks good, and that shift can wipe away skepticism that 
would otherwise remain. Just doing the thing without batteries in the 
first place, the other sources of deception or error would be more 
obvious and wouldn't get so easily dismissed. And it looks to me like 
they have surrounded this thing with layers of such tricks.


Imagine this dialog, a little down the way:

Steorn: They claimed that we were running this on batteries. Well, we 
removed the batteries and it still runs. They claimed that we were 
replacing the batteries when the webcams were off, and trading out 
units. Well, we ran a continuous webcam for X time with no 
interruptions. They claimed that the translucent panels were 
obscuring the real mechanism. We replaced them with transparent 
panels. So what objections remain?


Critic: It's fraud, there is a hidden battery within one or more of 
the components, or some other transmission of power into the system.


Steorn: See what scoundrels these critics are? We answered every 
objection, and so then they resort to claims of fraud. It's obvious 
that they are simply out to deny whatever we demonstrate.


And remember, it doesn't have to convince everyone. Just a few. They 
could keep this up for a long time!


Here is what I'd say: anyone considering investing in Steorn should 
get together with others considering the same. If the possible 
investors were to cooperate with each other, they could be protected. 
Steorn may try to defend against this, but the very defense would be visible.


And then I'd say this: want to keep it secret, want to make the big 
killing by being the only investor with the guts and perspicacity to 
see beyond the foggy notions of modern physics, you will deserve what 
you get. Hint: it won't be profit, it will be loss. You won't ever 
see that investment again. If I'm wrong, a consortium of investors 
could find out, and possible losses would be minimized.


If Steorn doesn't allow investment by corporations or partnerships, 
that would be a hint. A corporation could be formed to be this kind 
of consortium, easily, or it could be a partnership, and the partners 
would certainly be allowed to share the information internally among 
each other. An NDA which prohibited this would probably be 
unenforceable, and I'd fully support subterfuge in attacking 
unreasonable interpretations of an NDA. There is a legitimate purpose 
to NDAs, and it would not be to prevent people from helping each 
other to avoid disclosure that the thing was a scam and not 
reproducible, *to each other, not necessarily to the public.


If the consortium found evidence of actual fraud -- and this whole 
thing looks like, certainly, it's at or over that edge -- then no 
contract could prevent disclosure, it would be completely 
unenforceable. A consortium, of course, could afford lawyers. It 
could have resources much greater than Steorn. And it could even 
present itself to Steorn as an individual. All it would have to do

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 02:44 PM 12/16/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:



On 12/16/2009 02:23 PM, Terry Blanton wrote:



So, not only are the batteries running down (obvious from the slowing
of the motors discussed in another thread) but the units seem to be
failing.  The cameras also go off line at convenient times.  What in
heck are they up to?  Too much Irish whiskey?


Conclusions:

1) They're not slick, after all.  (I was certainly wrong about 
that.)  I guess we should have guessed that from the earlier fiasco.


2) They're not all that bright, it appears.  This isn't going to 
convince anyone of anything good, and they should have at least had 
a good idea of how long their batteries would last.  Did they even 
test this design before they set up the demo?


3) There's no hidden power source.

4) Their demo is obviously totally phony.

5) This is too blatant to be self-deception.  Nobody capable of 
building a motor of any sort could be so totally retarded as these 
guys would need to be to continue believing their own nonsense with 
stuff like this going on.


6) When I said things would still be murky come the end of January, 
I was wrong.


Didn't someone have a theory that they were doing all this just to 
show how good they are at running a PR campaign?


If Steorn really does have investors, they may get into rather deep 
trouble over this -- they are surely in violation of a number of 
securities laws.  Madoff's team had no exit strategy, which I found 
nearly inexplicable.  Perhaps these folks have the same disease 
(whatever it is).


A perpmo machine built from existing novelty toys would work 
better than their demo.


Well, Stephen, my comment is that you are effing naive. You are 
correct about the visible facts, but are making exactly the kind of 
assumptions that a skilled magician would want you to make. There are 
people who know how to do this stuff, you know!


I have some serious problems with the Amazing Randi, but he is good 
at smelling out some of this stuff, because he's been good at it 
himself. It's called Magic. The art of deception, and a major device 
is misdirection. You create an impression in the audience of what the 
trick is, building that, allowing them to believe it, then you turn 
it upside down and show that their theory is totally false. You have 
done something entirely different, and, having put so much energy 
into the hypothesis you led them into, with all your skill, they are 
flat footed and their jaws drop and they have no ideas at all.


That's the effect of that contrast between expectation and reality. 
For a moment, it creates the impression that they don't know Bleep. 
That's actually a good thing, by the way. We don't, more often than 
we like to admit. But that doesn't mean that you should give all your 
money to a someone who can turn a $1 bill into a $20 with his little 
box, so that he can multiply it for you. Even if he lets you look at 
the box all you want. There are other ways to run that trick that 
don't involve anything odd about the box! More than one.


Really, if you are up against a skilled magician, you are dealing 
with someone with a thousand times as much experience in the 
situation as you. This person knows all the responses you might have, 
can observe and see exactly what you are thinking, etc., and knows 
how to lead that thinking exactly where he wants it to go. It's 
skill, born of study and practice, and isn't really a mystery -- 
except inasmuch as human consciousness and skill are mysteries

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 03:37 PM 12/16/2009, Hoyt A. Stearns Jr. wrote:

I'm on thin ice with that question, so all I can say is it is connected, but
not in the normal way.  All the battery energy is dissipated as heat, not
KE.


Well, Hoyt, you can get off the thin ice, I will ask you some generic 
questions that should not involve the violation of any enforceable NDA.


1. Do you understand how the device works, sufficiently that if 
Steorn were to disappear, you could reproduce it? Do you have 
documentation this, adequate to reproduce?


2. Do you know that it works, that there is excess energy in the system?

3. How do you know this? I'm not asking for specific, just a general 
comment that can later be compared with what becomes known. To put 
this question a different way, how much are you relying on your own 
experience and how much on what they have told you?


4. Is there a time limit on the NDA?

5. If you found what you believed to be fraud, would you be 
prohibited by the NDA from revealing this to the authorities? (If so, 
the NDA is itself illegal and unenforceable.)


6. Can you discuss what you have found with anyone, such as your own 
employees or counselors?


7. How the eff do you explain the really dumb demonstration, laden 
with hosts of obvious flaws? I have a theory, as you may have 
noticed. Other than that theory, the default idea seems to be that 
they are just plain dumb and incompetent. How would you explain that 
a bunch of incompetent people have ended up in control of this 
discovery with huge consequences?


8. Can you understand why we are Skeptical as Hell? Would it be 
rational for us to believe at this point that there was any 
significant possibility that there really is an over unity device 
here? Out of what is publicly known, can you give us a reason to 
think otherwise?


9. Suppose a possible investor were to consult with you. Before 
putting any money in and getting the information you have, could that 
investor purchase an indemnity from you, such that you would have to 
cover the investor's losses if there were fraud involved on the part 
of Steorn? After all, if the information is solid and has been 
confirmed by you, the indemnity would be easy money.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

At 04:00 PM 12/16/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:

What's the payoff? ...That Steorn is really good at manipulating PR?
...That they they can pull a fast one on everyone? There seems to be
an equally unproven assumption that if Steorn can pull it off that
future prospective clients will know that they, too, will be able to
cash in on Steorn's PR skills and make tons of money by hiring them to
manipulate PR to their own advantage.

Such convoluted reasoning stretches my own internal BS scale. However,
I also have to confess that having such a conclusion prominently
displayed over at Wikipedia as the preferred explanation probably
didn't help my predisposition in taking it seriously. ;-)

Okay, being the resident expert on Wikipedia
(there are certainly people who know it better
than I, but they aren't reading this list, I think), I'll look at the article.

All right. The account above is inaccurate. While
individual articles often violate guidelines on
neutrality and sourcing, due to the way that
Wikipedia process operates, and there are also
groups of editors who might be highly inclined to
put in skeptical material outside of what the
guidelines allow, the article doesn't state that
advertising PR skills is the preferred explanation.

Rather, the article simply reports that this
explanation has been offered by some published
commentators, and it also notes others. It's
possible that the standards for published have
been pushed a little, but the article presents
this neutrally, as far as I've noticed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

About the 2007 demonstration. They blamed it on a
failed bearing due to the greenhouse effect in
the plastic housing. Okay, so it took them two
years to fix the bearing and pop some cooling holes in the plastic housing?

No, it's obvious, I'd say. They are creating delay.

If the article is accurate, they have already, at
least once, released misleading information, by their own account.

In May 2006,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_Business_PostThe
Sunday Business Post reported that Steorn was a
former
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot.comdot.com
business which was developing a microgenerator
product based on the same principle as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energykinetic
energy generators in watches, as well as
creating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commercee-commerce
websites for customers. The company had also
recently raised about 2.5 million from
investors and was three years into a four year
development plan for its microgenerator
technology.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn#cite_note-post-ie-9[10]
Steorn has since stated that the account given
in this interview was intended to prevent a leak
regarding their
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energyfree
energy
technology.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn#cite_note-steorn-crisis-management-interview-10[11]

In other words, when it suits them, they will
lie. At least that's how it looks to me! Lies are
sometimes not reprehensible. But ... the lies
that aren't reprehensible are lies to enemies who
will do harm with information, but the Sunday
Business Post? The public? Gratuitous
misinformation? Does that explanation make any sense at all, on the face of it?

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson

Abd remarks,

...

 What I do claim is that the Steorn situation bears very strong marks
 of being a con, a fairly sophisticated one, where they are
 deliberately setting up demonstrations with obvious flaws, which they
 can then remedy, setting up the rebound effect.

...

You may recall that I also recently voiced similar speculation. I also
speculated that STEORN is deliberately attempting to lead all the skeptics
and debunkers down to the slaughter house where at the right moment they
will all get wacked on the head. Very calculated... Very dramatic. However,
in my scenario, I seem to have come to a different conclusion. It seems more
plausible for me to speculate that Steorn actually believes that their ORBO
device is for real. IOW, I don't yet buy the premise that it's a con job.

OF course, under my scenario it's quite possible that the Steorn engineers
have deluded themselves.

Please understand, I remain highly skeptical of Steorn's claims. Like
everyone here, I demand definitive evidence and am disappointed that Steorn
has not yet delivered on that point. Nevertheless I'm having a difficult
time perceiving how this con game you have described could possibly
benefit Steorn. If this is all nothing more than a deliberate (albeit
sophisticated) con game then it's all a house of cards and they will
eventually get caught. There's no way around the fact that they would
eventually get caught. The village will rise up in arms with pitchforks they
and torches in hand and run them all out of town, that is after they are
tarred and feathered and sent to the slammer. Granted, I could be wrong but
I really, REALLY have a difficult time believing they could be that stupid
as to believe they could pull off such a con job on the public, not with the
amount of constant scrutiny they are receiving.

When do they get to eat their cake? More to the point, how can they get to
the cake without getting the heads cut off?

 And remember, it doesn't have to convince everyone. Just a few. They could
keep this up for a long time!

I disagree. I think Steorn would have to convince a LOT of people in order
to pull it off, but in the end it would still fail - they will still be
tarred and feathered. It's my understanding that most con jobs are done with
as little publicity as possible since con artists typically go after the
ignorant and uneducated, and the best way to accomplish that is to operate
as discretely as possible - preferably from Nigeria! ;-) I realize some
might point to Madoff as an example of a high profile successful con job.
But again I disagree. I realize many people got bilked out of billions of
dollars, but eventually, Madoff didn't succeed, and where is he now. 

 Here is what I'd say: anyone considering investing in Steorn should get
together with
 others considering the same. If the possible investors were to cooperate
with each other,
 they could be protected. Steorn may try to defend against this, but the
very defense would
 be visible

Sounds sensible. I personally would demand that before I would be willing to
open up my check book that I be personally shown the device running. The
contraption had better be powering a light bulb with NO batteries in sight!
I would also demand that I be allowed to bring in anyone of my choosing whom
I knew to be competent in engineering principals, preferably electrical
engineering who could advise me.

 It will be fun to watch, I'm enjoying this tremendously. Stay tuned for
the next Episode
 of Steorn Watch. Will all the devices run down? Will one of them
mysteriously keep running?
 Will the demonstration be interrupted by a mysterious fire that burns the
building down,
 destroying all the very valuable demonstration models, constructed at
tremendous expense
 according to detailed plans that were also destroyed? Or will Steorn
remove all the veils,
 pulling those translucent covers away like a magician turning the hat
over?

Yes, it is fun to watch, especially when one has no financial involvement!

I'm still waiting for them to screw in the light bulb and get rid of the
battery. That might pique my interest.

Regards

Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence




On 12/17/2009 08:38 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 02:44 PM 12/16/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:



On 12/16/2009 02:23 PM, Terry Blanton wrote:



So, not only are the batteries running down (obvious from the slowing
of the motors discussed in another thread) but the units seem to be
failing. The cameras also go off line at convenient times. What in
heck are they up to? Too much Irish whiskey?


Conclusions:

1) They're not slick, after all. (I was certainly theowrong about that.) I
guess we should have guessed that from the earlier fiasco.

2) They're not all that bright, it appears. This isn't going to
convince anyone of anything good, and they should have at least had a
good idea of how long their batteries would last. Did they even test
this design before they set up the demo?

3) There's no hidden power source.

4) Their demo is obviously totally phony.

5) This is too blatant to be self-deception. Nobody capable of
building a motor of any sort could be so totally retarded as these
guys would need to be to continue believing their own nonsense with
stuff like this going on.

6) When I said things would still be murky come the end of January, I
was wrong.

Didn't someone have a theory that they were doing all this just to
show how good they are at running a PR campaign?

If Steorn really does have investors, they may get into rather deep
trouble over this -- they are surely in violation of a number of
securities laws. Madoff's team had no exit strategy, which I found
nearly inexplicable. Perhaps these folks have the same disease
(whatever it is).

A perpmo machine built from existing novelty toys would work better
than their demo.


Well, Stephen, my comment is that you are effing naive.


Indeed.  Ça, c'est un peu fort, n'est-ce pas?

None the less, I'm flabbergasted at the appallingly low level of this 
demo.  It is light years worse than anything I expected.


The fact that the machines are *slowing* *down* as the batteries drain, 
right on camera (according to Terry, I haven't double checked it but I 
trust his comments), is really startling, because it contradicts 
assertions made by Steorn to the effect that the batteries aren't 
driving the motors.  It shows them lying.  Explaining away a lie is not 
something anyone wants to need to do.


The fact that they are having the cameras shut down frequently, that 
they are blatantly swapping out machines as they slow down or stop 
(which makes their claim that the demo would show a really long run into 
another lie), just leaves me feeling amazed.  The issue of changing the 
batteries just isn't coming up:  They're changing out whole units!  This 
goes so far beyond leaving an obvious objection around for critics to 
pounce on that it smells really strongly of plain, simple, old, 
technical incompetence.


In short, they're painting themselves as liars in loud, garish colors. 
Your theory that they're doing all this so they can come up from the 
rear in a Garrison finish and charm the world is interesting but, at 
this stage, difficult to believe.


As yet, I see no evidence whatsoever to support your assertion that they 
are really very slick showmen.


More and more, I'm liking the alternate theory, which is that Sean 
McCarthy is surrounded by yes-men and is out of touch with how far off 
his company is from being able to pull off a decent demo.




You are correct
about the visible facts, but are making exactly the kind of assumptions
that a skilled magician would want you to make. There are people who
know how to do this stuff, you know!


Yes, but at this point I'm not convinced any of those people are in 
charge at Steorn.  (If they are, they are staying very far out of sight.)


You are apparently _assuming_ that there are skilled magicians 
involved here.  I haven't seen any evidence to support that, any hint of 
such a person being behind the scenes, any fingerprint of a talented 
slight of hand artist.  All I *see* so far is garbage put together by 
boobs, and blizzards of words to explain away the problems.




I have some serious problems with the Amazing Randi, but he is good at
smelling out some of this stuff, because he's been good at it himself.
It's called Magic. The art of deception, and a major device is
misdirection. You create an impression in the audience of what the trick
is, building that, allowing them to believe it, then you turn it upside
down and show that their theory is totally false. You have done
something entirely different, and, having put so much energy into the
hypothesis you led them into, with all your skill, they are flat footed
and their jaws drop and they have no ideas at all.


Sounds good.  But magicians don't usually start by working to convince 
everyone that they are incompetent liars.  That's a label nobody wants 
to start with.


Consider, once again, the bit with the machines slowing down, apparently 
as a result of the batteries draining.  If that's not for real, then 
it's done solely to

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence




On 12/17/2009 10:10 PM, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:


I disagree. I think Steorn would have to convince a LOT of people in order
to pull it off, but in the end it would still fail - they will still be
tarred and feathered. It's my understanding that most con jobs are done with
as little publicity as possible since con artists typically go after the
ignorant and uneducated, and the best way to accomplish that is to operate
as discretely as possible - preferably from Nigeria! ;-) I realize some
might point to Madoff as an example of a high profile successful con job.
But again I disagree. I realize many people got bilked out of billions of
dollars, but eventually, Madoff didn't succeed, and where is he now.


Wait -- Madoff is held up as an example of a high profile con job that 
shows the sort of things a con artist will attempt.


He's held up as an example of how you can get staff members to go along 
and do the heavy lifting to make the con work.


But he's **NOT** held up as an example of a successful con artist, 
because he (a) had no exit strategy, (b) was running a con for which no 
conceivable exit strategy existed which could have covered all the 
people involved in it, and (c) was running a con which was absolutely 
guaranteed to collapse, as a result of which it absolutely required an 
exit strategy (but see (a) and (b)).


In other words, far from being successful, his was a con whose failure 
was absolutely assured.


And as such it provides an existence proof for people who are 
intelligent, dishonest, and yet are also fools, all at the same time.


Any reasoning which goes, Joe can't be conning us, because if he is, 
he's sure to get in trouble eventually, and he knows it, so he wouldn't 
do that... is proven to be false by the existence of the Madoff gang.


By the standards of normal humans, who are by and large honest most of 
the time and more or less law abiding, professional criminals are 
insane.  When trying to understand con artists, this is a good thing to 
keep in mind.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-17 Thread Esa Ruoho

Rick always writes what he means and means what he says. He's the guy
who sells the Bedini kits, there's a 10 coil monopole kit that they
have released, for instance. http://rpmgt.org/order.html
The Bedini Monopole Energizer kit was built by a friend and he came to
the conclusion that it's only for learning-purposes, and can be taken
further (it's possible that mr. Friedrich has upped his ante and knows
and understands more about the Bedini monopole tech - and that the
10-pole energizer would be quite worth looking into. But at that
price? Not sure how much machining something like that would cost, but
they mention it'd be in the tens of thousands of usd?  on the page..)
Rick also features on the Energy From The Vacuum series as a spectator
of Bedini showing his stuff, I think in EFTV12 perchance. The detail
here that (I guess) matters, is that Bedini chose Friedrich to make
the kits available via, and Friedrich also sells the Renaissance
charger devices, and has relations to Bedini's EnergenX -company. It's
not a random guy shooting the breeze on a mailinglist, if I'm not
completely mistaken, Friedrich maintains some of the monopole lists
and is in general a guy who would know what Bedini is up to, and
what's next.
Looking at what Friedrich wrote about 1/3 of the amps going into the
secondary - he is quite probably talking about the secondary batteries
that get charged while the primary batteries provide the juice for the
transformation process.

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 7:45 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote:


 On 12/16/2009 12:07 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

 At 11:00 AM 12/16/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:

 No he didn't.  Esa Ruoho quoted rickfriedrich from the bedini_monopole_3
 forum.  It was Rick who was experimenting with the Bedini motor described
 here, not Esa, and AFAIK Rick isn't on Vortex.

 Rick's batteries are apparently magic, if I understood this quote; he says a
 good number of amps were constantly being drawn [from the batteries?]
 but the batteries remained charged; I don't understand that.  He must have
 meant something other than how I interpreted his words.
 I was running the system on smaller used batteries for days and they
 remained charged even though a good number of amps were constantly
 being drawn and the meter was showing 1/3rd of the amps going back
 into the secondary.
 Take a hint. Fine to set it up and start it with batteries, but
 batteries are tricky to monitor, they don't easily show the exact state
 of the charge. Put together a capacitor bank with enough depth (farads)
 to cover the draw phase, and charge it up to the battery voltage. Then
 once you are running, take the battery out of the circuit. You can then
 directly monitor the power storage by monitoring the capacitor voltage.
 No guessing. You will know right away if you are over unity, and how
 much, or, if you are under unity, exactly how much you are under unity.

 The larger the capacitance, the more even the available voltage will be.
 I'd think of making it really large, so you would not want to directly
 connect the battery to the capacitor, that can melt wires! You'd charge
 through a resistor. You could make all this part of one circuit, with a
 switch on the battery, or you could eliminate the battery and use a
 power supply which you then, once the thing is running, disconnect.

 Unless, of course, you want a demonstration that looks reasonably good
 through the idea that a battery couldn't possible last this long. As
 another pointed out, pulse charging can make batteries last much longer
 than we might expect. But a capacitor won't lie.

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

 The battery is puzzling, but they do not hide it, so I do not see how
 it could be part of a scam.

Buy lots of Magniwork kits.  After all, they promise a refund, and that
proves it cannot be a scam!   :)

But seriously, if scammers can find a way to make their scam appear less
scammy, they will do so.  I imagine them thinking Aha, I know.  I'll just
feature the battery prominently.  Then the marks will leap to the
conclusion that it can't be part of the scam.


 Mark Iverson wrote:

 so it should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept
 running for weeks, months when it should draw down the battery in a
 matter of days...

Minutes, not days  ...if supercaps were used instead of a battery.





(( ( (  (   ((O))   )  ) ) )))
William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/15/2009 09:26 PM, Hoyt A. Stearns Jr. wrote:

As a Steorn Non Disclosure Agreement signatory and knowledgeable insider, I
have a few comments:

The energy in the battery does not go to the kinetic energy of the rotor, it
is used as an easy way to modify some
parameters of the device.  Steorn does have all permanent magnet motors ( so
they claim ),


But you, as a knowledgeable insider, have never seen their 
all-permanent-magnet motors?

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


William Beaty wrote:


On Tue, 15 Dec 2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

 The battery is puzzling, but they do not hide it, so I do not see how
 it could be part of a scam.

Buy lots of Magniwork kits.  After all, they promise a refund, and that
proves it cannot be a scam!   :)

But seriously, if scammers can find a way to make their scam appear less
scammy, they will do so.  I imagine them thinking Aha, I know.  I'll just
feature the battery prominently.  Then the marks will leap to the
conclusion that it can't be part of the scam.







 Mark Iverson wrote:

 so it should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept
 running for weeks, months when it should draw down the battery in a
 matter of days...

Minutes, not days  ...if supercaps were used instead of a battery.


If it can be shown conclusively that the battery is connected only to 
the control electronics, and it does not power the motor, then it 
might as well be a D cell battery. For that matter, it might as well 
be a DC power supply. Strictly from an engineering point of view, it 
would not make the thing more convincing to have the motor generate 
electricity which recharges the D cell battery. That would only 
complicate the design.


I suppose it would feel more authentic to have the thing running 
entirely without a battery, and it would be somewhat more convincing. 
But the claim will not be really convincing until the devices are 
independently replicated and examined by 5 or 10 groups other than 
Steorn, or at least until several groups get a chance to examine 
copies of the machine and measure input and output energy more 
rigorously than Steorn has done. I am not holding my breath expecting 
that to happen.


For now, I think a D cell is not a big issue. There are so many ways 
to fake it, and they have done such a poor job of presenting the 
device, the battery hardly affects their credibility.


- Jed

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


I wrote:

. . . [T]his is a variation of the non-falsifiable claim that the 
more credible a claim appears to be, the more likely it is a scam. 
In that case, as a real claim and a scam approach perfection, it 
becomes impossible to tell them apart. That can't be!


What I mean is, strictly according to this standard, on the day 
Steorn ships its millionth magnet motor powered automobile and 
declares a trillion-dollar net worth, they will have achieved the perfect scam.


At some point, the scam and the real thing diverge. There have to be 
criteria that make an dependable distinction between the two. I 
believe there is: independent replication and verification.


- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 09:33 AM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:



On 12/15/2009 09:26 PM, Hoyt A. Stearns Jr. wrote:

As a Steorn Non Disclosure Agreement signatory and knowledgeable
insider, I
have a few comments:

The energy in the battery does not go to the kinetic energy of the
rotor, it
is used as an easy way to modify some
parameters of the device. Steorn does have all permanent magnet motors
( so
they claim ),


But you, as a knowledgeable insider, have never seen their
all-permanent-magnet motors?


By the way, this statement by Hoyt Stearns answers one question.  The 
folks at Steorn are not simply confused about things, and they are not 
simply fooling themselves.


If they are claiming to have working all-permanent-magnet motors, then 
either they're lying, or it's the Dawn of a New Era.  You can't be 
confused about whether you have something or not, and a motor with *no* 
internal power source is not something you can sort of have, subject 
to interpretation -- you've either got it or you don't.


In fact they claimed this back before their earlier demo, which was 
supposed to show just such a motor, if I recall correctly; however, it 
didn't.

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 09:26 PM 12/15/2009, Hoyt A. Stearns Jr. wrote:

As a Steorn Non Disclosure Agreement signatory and knowledgeable insider, I
have a few comments:

The energy in the battery does not go to the kinetic energy of the rotor, it
is used as an easy way to modify some
parameters of the device.  Steorn does have all permanent magnet motors ( so
they claim ), but it's much easier to adjust
parameters with some electric currents than mechanically moving parts around
or changing magnetic alloys.


Look, this is an impossible situation. Because of your nondisclosure 
agreement, any reasonable answers you could give to the essential 
questions will violate the agreement. Basically, your comments here 
are a red herring, all they can do is to place your personal 
reputation, whatever that is, on the line. It's a variation on Trust 
me! How are we to know that you have not, yourself, been duped?


Can the contents of the NDA be disclosed? Before people sign the NDA, 
have they signed an agreement not to disclose the contents of the 
NDA? Can you even answer these questions?


Adjusting parameters apparently takes energy. Adjustment of 
parameters can dump some of that energy into a device.


Now, if the thing really charges batteries, why don't they start with 
an empty battery? Give the thing a swing with the hand, and off it 
would go! Use capacitors. You know the drill, I'm sure.


The demonstration is designed to fail to demonstrate, that's clear. 
You know perfectly well that they could have arranged a better 
demonstration, if they wanted to succeed in that. Hence, even if they 
have a real technology, they are imitating the behavior of a long 
line of fools and con men. So, my interesting question: why?


You do speculate on this to some degree. But the sum of all of it for 
me: I assume it is bogus, because of this kind of behavior, until 
some real evidence appears otherwise.



I understand the principle of the demo units, and it makes sense to me, and
I've done several experiments to demonstrate the effect.


Cool. But the NDA and associate agreements make it completely 
impractical for you to do the deeper work necessary to fully 
characterize the effect, and you can't tell us the content of your 
experiments. So, once again, your comment boils down to trust me.


That's fine, but doesn't get us very far.


The engineers at Steorn are not stupid, in fact they show extraordinary
skills and understanding of physics and electrical engineering.


I don't have a problem with this. But very smart people can get 
caught in a net of collusion and deception. Happens all the time, actually.



I think they have other much more effective embodyments that haven't been
revealed yet.


Apparently you trust them.


Their strategy is rather bizarre, but in a way I think it is ingenious for
many reasons (speculative):

They must prove that their techniques are not obvious to anyone skilled in
the art for patentability, even though they are extremely simple.


Look, if this works, it is satisfies that condition of patentability, 
intrinsically. There is no obvious technique for over-unity devices, 
and, indeed, they are often considered unpatentable. However, ways of 
operating such a device, minus the over-unity claim, can be and have 
been patented, that's the Bedini motor.



They have released many clues over the years, and still no one has
conclusively made a self runner ( except one person who was unable to repeat
his experiment after trying to optimize it ).


That's not exactly encouraging.


They must avoid serious attention of the Men In Black. This is a delicate
balancing act.


If they are trying to avoid attention, they are not doing a very good 
job of it. It seems that they are attempting to attract attention. My 
tentative conclusion is that attention is exactly what they want. 
They are charging for getting a look at the technology, and, I'm 
sure, this comes with heavy NDAs, so  they may be able to make 
money simply by generating enough buzz and raising enough curiosity. 
How could I distinguish between this hypothesis and what appears to 
be yours: the technology works and they are merely running a 
delicate balancing act.



They would like parties to sign contracts before they understand that the
principles are simple and they could've used them anyway.


Contracts cannot be enforced if they are contrary to public policy.


Sean McCarthy wants the skeptics to shoot their load and get that stuff
over with at the beginning.  He's having fun thumbing
his nose at them (as am I).


Sure, he's having fun, and so are you. But don't blame the rest of us 
if we make the obvious conclusions. Have your fun. Enjoy your 
isolation, and the fallout, if it's what pulls your chain.


There is no load to my skepticism. There is, in fact, simply a 
show me. That show me cannot be exhausted until I'm shown! So 
he's playing with knee-jerk skepticism, and, indeed, using it to 
amplify the publicity. Showmanship,

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 10:09 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote:

I wrote:


. . . [T]his is a variation of the non-falsifiable claim that the more
credible a claim appears to be, the more likely it is a scam. In that
case, as a real claim and a scam approach perfection, it becomes
impossible to tell them apart. That can't be!


What I mean is, strictly according to this standard, on the day Steorn
ships its millionth magnet motor powered automobile and declares a
trillion-dollar net worth, they will have achieved the perfect scam.

At some point, the scam and the real thing diverge. There have to be
criteria that make an dependable distinction between the two. I believe
there is: independent replication and verification.


Yes, yes, and yes -- I don't disagree with what you're saying here, but 
I would like to clarify what I said to start with just a little.


I certainly wasn't trying to say that anything that doesn't look like a 
scam must therefore be a scam!  I was merely trying to say that if a 
person doesn't behave the way you *EXPECT* a scammer to behave, that, by 
itself, doesn't prove anything, because any true scammer is going to be 
trying very hard *not* to look like a scammer.


To put it in terms of a trite old metaphor, you can't judge a book by 
its cover.  You must judge by the substance, not by the appearance.


They *show* the battery -- a scammer, you say, wouldn't do that.  Well, 
then, maybe they're honest, or maybe they're just trying to act that 
way.  So, showing the battery does not actually prove anything about 
their honesty -- and that was my point.


But as to the substance -- since there are no published, checkable 
numbers regarding this demonstration (we don't know the battery drain, 
we don't know the power required to spin the motor), there is no 
substance to this demonstration, and it consequently shows nothing. 
Quite aside from replications or lack thereof, there are NO QUANTITATIVE 
CLAIMS made about this demo!  They're apparently not even *trying* to 
show anything with it!  It looks cool, it goes around, maybe it's 
entertaining to watch, but that's all.


Now -- back to appearances -- a scammer is not going to tell you what 
the battery drain is, and what the torque required to drive the motor 
is, because that would also require disclosing the technique used to 
measure same, which would open them up to being checked.  And the check 
could show in short order that the numbers didn't match the claims.  So, 
with this thought in mind, we can see that the Steorn folks are acting 
*exactly* like scammers:  They are carefully avoiding making the 
numerical claims which would be necessary to provide any substance to 
their demonstration.  Honest researchers publish numbers.  Scammers wave 
their hands, or provide numbers which can't be checked.  This bit of 
behavioral difference is *required* by the nature of scamming:  The 
scammer hasn't got the numbers to back up the claims and so can't 
publish them  (or, if he invents the numbers, he must assure that 
nobody can check the claimed values).


Note well:  CF researchers publish numbers.  Many of them document 
everything they do, in painful detail.  This is an important point to 
keep in mind:  CF: lots of numbers.   Steorn: No numbers.



Hoyt Stearns tells us the battery merely modifies parameters and 
doesn't directly provide kinetic energy.  But without knowing what 
parameters it modifies, that also tells us nothing, and we're left 
with no more information than we had before regarding inputs and 
outputs, and again, the demo shows nothing.  According to pages on the 
Web describing the demo, the battery is powering an outer ring of coils, 
which sounds to me like it's doing something more than just modifying 
parameters -- but again, this is hearsay, based on vague statements to 
start with, without any numbers attached to anything.






- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 08:16 PM 12/15/2009, Terry Blanton wrote:

We built a Bedini motor, specifically, the bicycle wheel type known as
the school girl motor and measured the efficiency with a torque
meter.  We found the efficiency to be around 30%.

The truth is that pulse charging of a battery removes the sulfides
that accumulate on the plates.  John knows this since he has a charger
which he says rejuvenates golf cart batteries.

Pulse motors fool a lot of people but not a torque meter.  :-)


In other words, the pulse charging of the battery in a Bedini motor 
operates the battery in a mode which extracts maximum energy from it. 
So the battery lasts much longer than expected. Is that correct?


But the use of capacitors wouldn't be subject to this effect, and the 
decline in energy would be obvious, as voltage would continually 
decline until it was too low to operate the device. Hence such 
devices don't use capacitors in place of batteries.


This is even without fraudulent intent. Add fraudulent intent, which 
sometimes appears later, when the inventor exhausts his approaches to 
perfect the device, but is under pressure to perform a 
demonstration or his funding gets yanked, etc., and all bets are off. 
There are countless ways to conceal an energy source. And that some 
parts of the device are not clearly visible simply amplifies 
suspicion that this is happening.


Consider this from the point of view of a master con game:

At this point, the obvious suspicion is that the power is being 
supplied by the battery. So, after they have run this demonstration 
for a while, then they start addressing the obvious objections.


1. The hours of observation. They remove the restriction. For a 
modest fee, enough to pay the security guard to sit there, you can 
watch as long as you want. They even make you pay the cost. Or maybe 
they even cover it, and just pay the guard themselves. Whatever is 
needed to overcome this obvious objection.


2. The battery. They have a capacitor battery replacement. They 
charge it up to the battery voltage and replace the battery with it. 
The device keeps running. They even show the capacitor voltage. Damn! 
The peak is staying constant or is even increasing slowly.


3. The translucent panels are replaced with clear ones.

By this time the skeptics are flattened, all they can do is keep 
repeating Fraud! And they might be right, but because Steorn has 
addressed the obvious objections, ones which they set up in the first 
place by the way they arranged the demonstration, the skeptics are 
sufficiently beaten, in the eyes of possible investors, that more 
investment comes in. The real goal is this, not a demonstration.


The demonstration has been arranged to set up this process. That's 
why such obvious objections are not addressed ab initio. It's quite 
skillful, politically. Set up your opponents to make false 
objections, then expose the objections as false. This creates inertia 
against your opponents, for if they made a series of false 
objections, they must be biased, right?


Thus the argument that the objections have been answered gains legs.

It looks to me like this is what they are doing, but there are more 
things in heaven and earth than I have dreamed of. Including 
incredibly sophisticated con games.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread Esa Ruoho

rick friedrich likens steorn to bedini  on bedini_monopole_3.
(im fairly sure its steorn being talked about, since the whole thing
was launched yesterday)
:
:
:
Subject: Every so often someone copies Bedini at the right time
Posted by: rickfriedrich rickfriedr...@yahoo.com   rickfriedrich
Wed Dec 16, 2009 5:08 am (PST)

Looks like yesterday another company copied a Bedini system and gave
no credit. Just when the 10 coiler is about to go out someone else has
to grab at the attention. I need not mention names, as a new name will
appear doing the same thing in a few months.

We are making progress on the latest monopole system. A few parts
delays but nothing fundamental. A few last minute changes.

The ten coiler will be capable of being a 30 coiler system on the
frame provided by simply multiplying the rotor, coils, circuits and
frame. Or it could be a 10 or 20 coiler with an extra rotor for the
energizer coils just as this other company was attempting to show
yesterday. The coils can feed back to the primary or power other
loads. Again, John Bedini showed this back in 1984, and even published
a book on doing it. He showed many ways to do this, and yet new
companies spring up wishing to take avantage and not give credit. And
they seem to do this always at a key time. I remember when I first
started noticing this back in 2004 after the SG first got started.
Suddenly people started pulling generators out of the closet which
they didn't even know how to run. Got to cash in on the Bedini
attention!

Well I thought I would just make a little notice of this in the middle
of the night when I don't have the time.

The testing is coming along well. It is not an easy system to grasp.
The trigger resistances are complex and require a lot of work to map
out. I'm doing that work for everyone to save months of time. We are
going to provide a lot of parts to vary the machine quite a bit. This
gives maximum experimental benefit, as well as flexibility.

I was running the system on smaller used batteries for days and they
remained charged even though a good number of amps were constantly
being drawn and the meter was showing 1/3rd of the amps going back
into the secondary.

If you like small 3 coiler then this is just much bigger. About 10,000
times the potential. It will do the same thing.

Rick
::
:
:
:


so my question: is the steorn rig so similar to the bedini rig? both
use batteries, both charge batteries, both capture with coils, and
there's a rectification circuit. or at least in the case of steorn.
what then?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

If they are claiming to have working all-permanent-magnet motors, 
then either they're lying, or it's the Dawn of a New Era.  You can't 
be confused about whether you have something or not, and a motor 
with *no* internal power source is not something you can sort of 
have, subject to interpretation -- you've either got it or you don't.


Well . . . as the Devil's advocate I would say you might have it for 
a while and then not have it later on. The motor might break 
inexplicably, after someone tries to improve it. Things like that 
often happen in cold fusion. The best known example is Mizuno's heat 
after death experiment. Granted, that is a very different phenomenon. 
It seems likely that it is much harder to make Mizuno's even happen a 
second time than it would be to make a second magnetic motor. 
Mizuno's 100 g cathode was cut up and destructively tested years ago.


People building revolutionary gadgets of this nature have a bad habit 
of destroying their prototypes, sometimes to re-use the parts, or 
sometimes just to make a bonfire to keep warm. (The Wright brothers 
used to burn their old gliders at Kitty Hawk, or give them to a women 
who used the cloth to make underwear. They almost burned the first 
powered airplane on December 17, 1903.)


Hoyt Stearns reports here that the people at Steorn find it easier to 
work with a machine that combines permanent magnets with 
electromagnets, because this makes modifying the prototype a snap. I 
gather that is what he means. That sounds plausible. They don't want 
to bother making a fully self-sustaining one after you have 
established they can do that, because by making partially 
self-sustaining prototypes they make more rapid progress, and learn 
more about the phenomenon.


I am not saying I believe that, but it is plausible.

It reminds me a little of the situation with airplanes from 1905 to 
1908. The standard set by most wannabe aviators was that you had to 
get off the ground unassisted. This was spelled out in detail by 
Wilbur Wright in a paper: the airplane had to leave the ground on its 
own power, fly under control, and land at a spot at the same level or 
higher than the place where it took off. That was a reasonable 
standard, but the fact is, after the summer 1904 the Wrights did not 
bother to meet it. They used a catapult to launch the airplanes. You 
might say that was cheating, but it was safer and more convenient. 
The airplanes were severely underpowered and took a long mono-rail 
runway to get airborne. They had already proved they did not need a 
catapult, so they stopped worrying about that standard.


In August 1908, when Orville Wright got ready to fly in the first 
public demonstration in France, he and his assistants rolled out the 
airplane, and started to prepare the catapult to launch it. Some of 
the French aviators watching were angry and indignant, saying this is 
cheating. They kvetched and mocked him until he took off some minutes 
later. He leapt into the air and flew at high speed straight toward 
some trees. This would have killed any other aviator in the world, 
because no one else could control the aircraft. They could barely 
change course, by side-slipping in a dangerous and 
all-but-uncontrolled maneuver. They had no idea you have to change 
the shape of the wing and bank an airplane in order to turn. So the 
crowd gasped in horror, expecting to see Orville smash to smithereens 
at 40 mph in a moment. But Orville banked and flew neatly around the 
trees, came back to the starting point, and landed under perfect 
control. No aviator in Europe had ever done anything remotely like 
that. None even imagined it was possible. They instantly forgot about 
the catapult. The next day Orville was the most famous celebrity in Europe.


Along the same lines, suppose several people independently test the 
Steorn gadgets. They measure input and output by rigorous methods, 
and find out it really is over unity, but it turns out the D cell is 
contributing slightly by varying the magnet configuration on fly. It 
turns out that method is a lot easier and more reliable than using 
only permanent magnets. People will quickly overlook that. It will be 
a trivial matter. It will be obvious that a more complicated version 
of the gadget can eliminate the D cell by adding a generator, just as 
it was obvious in 1908 that Orville Wright could have used a longer 
monorail to take off without the catapult.


- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 10:45 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 08:16 PM 12/15/2009, Terry Blanton wrote:

We built a Bedini motor, specifically, the bicycle wheel type known as
the school girl motor and measured the efficiency with a torque
meter. We found the efficiency to be around 30%.

The truth is that pulse charging of a battery removes the sulfides
that accumulate on the plates. John knows this since he has a charger
which he says rejuvenates golf cart batteries.

Pulse motors fool a lot of people but not a torque meter. :-)


In other words, the pulse charging of the battery in a Bedini motor
operates the battery in a mode which extracts maximum energy from it. So
the battery lasts much longer than expected. Is that correct?

But the use of capacitors wouldn't be subject to this effect, and the
decline in energy would be obvious, as voltage would continually decline
until it was too low to operate the device. Hence such devices don't use
capacitors in place of batteries.

This is even without fraudulent intent.


Supposedly many free energy researchers have been fooled by the 
pulse-charge effect, which is, as I understand it, peculiar to lead-acid 
batteries.  There was a guy with a self-charging electric car a while 
back, who eventually retracted his claims of OU; last I heard it sounded 
like he had been honest, and honestly sucked into believing his claims 
by the strange behavior of the batteries.


Not so sure this applies to nicads or NiMH batteries, which Steorn is using.



Add fraudulent intent, which
sometimes appears later, when the inventor exhausts his approaches to
perfect the device, but is under pressure to perform a demonstration
or his funding gets yanked, etc., and all bets are off. There are
countless ways to conceal an energy source. And that some parts of the
device are not clearly visible simply amplifies suspicion that this is
happening.

Consider this from the point of view of a master con game:

At this point, the obvious suspicion is that the power is being supplied
by the battery. So, after they have run this demonstration for a while,
then they start addressing the obvious objections.

1. The hours of observation. They remove the restriction. For a modest
fee, enough to pay the security guard to sit there, you can watch as
long as you want. They even make you pay the cost. Or maybe they even
cover it, and just pay the guard themselves. Whatever is needed to
overcome this obvious objection.


This by itself wouldn't help much.  The motor probably draws very, very 
little power.


Rechargeables have a significant self-discharge rate, which may actually 
be comparable to the drain on the battery by the Steorn motor. 
Consequently the battery may very well run down in a few months, without 
showing anything at all about the truth or falsehood of their claims:  A 
battery sitting in the display case with no external load at all would 
do the same thing.


In other words, even if the battery eventually runs down, that doesn't 
mean their claims are false.


Back to square 1:  The demo shows nothing, positive or negative.



2. The battery. They have a capacitor battery replacement. They charge
it up to the battery voltage and replace the battery with it. The device
keeps running. They even show the capacitor voltage. Damn! The peak is
staying constant or is even increasing slowly.


You can stop right there.  This step can not be part of a con.  That's 
the end of the road; at that point we're done.  The New Day has Dawned. 
 No need for transparent panels, save to show there's no hidden battery 
anyplace.


And, of course, it's the step we're never going to see.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 04:21 PM 12/15/2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
[Jed Rothwell wrote]:

If Steorn is a scam, it is an inept one.


Sez who?  They've got investors.  Ergo it's good enough for them, 
whether or not you think it's inept.


What's more, by the very crude bumbling naivete of their public 
demonstrations, they have apparently more than half convinced you, 
Jed, that they're honest!


I'd say that they're a pretty slick bunch.


That's my conclusion as well. I've come to the conclusion that the 
weakness of the demo is part of their design. They will start taking 
the covers off, so to speak, having aroused a host of obvious 
objections. They will address these objections one at a time. It's 
designed to exhaust skepticism, not for the skeptics, but as the 
skeptics are perceived by potential investors. When you have raised a 
series of objections to the demo, and then all of them -- except the 
fundamental one based on theory -- have been shown to be spurious, an 
investor may well conclude that this is a case of knee-jerk rejection 
of new technology.


And to find the real energy source (or to rule out that there is 
such) would require being able to take the thing apart and examine 
exhaustively every part, and the reassemble it and it still works. 
That's why independent replication based on specifications is so important.


A step below that is a kit that operates and is sold as a toy. So you 
can do the taking apart and thorough examination, if you want.


Supervised demonstrations with limitations on the observers are a 
classic setup for fraud. And given the circumstances and the depth of 
impact on theory and the way that Steorn is conducting itself, fraud 
must be the number one hypothesis, by this time. It wasn't 
necessarily the intention from the beginning, particularly if Hoyt is 
correct and there is some effect that appears to be over unity or 
somehow indicating it.


Jed is incorrect. This could be a very sophisticated scam, from the 
point of view of design for psychological impact on investors. I can 
see no other explanation for the blatantly weak demonstration. It's 
to set up objections that can then be answered. They have arranged 
quite a few of these, set them up, without any obvious necessity. The 
hours of observation? No process could prevent a hidden energy 
source, which could be very well-designed and quite concealed, but it 
would be simple to set up a web cam that watches the thing. They 
might do that. And it would mean nothing. It's just that not allowing 
continuous observation sets up an objection, that they can then 
easily address. Same with the battery, same with the translucent 
panels, and my guess is that there are more such objections, it was 
there intention to set up as many of these as possible, then remove the veils.


An old magician's trick, that distracts from the real 
sleight-of-hand. If I were them, trying to raise more capital, I'd 
have the power source be very carefully concealed within some 
component of the system, something that would be normally wired in. 
It could even be external, with power radiated into the device, 
picked up by coils. It could be something that I'd not even dream of. 
But monitoring all the voltages in the system would probably pick it 
up, or narrow down the possibilities, so, my guess, they won't allow that.


And they can justify any nondisclosure as necessary for their 
protection. And investors who demand transparency before writing a 
check? Obviously you aren't ready to invest in this. We'll wait for 
investors who are willing to take risks in order to gain tremendous 
rewards. Go fly a kite. They don't need to attract many!

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 11:06 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:


That's my conclusion as well. I've come to the conclusion that the
weakness of the demo is part of their design. They will start taking the
covers off, so to speak, having aroused a host of obvious objections.
They will address these objections one at a time. It's designed to
exhaust skepticism, not for the skeptics, but as the skeptics are
perceived by potential investors. When you have raised a series of
objections to the demo, and then all of them -- except the fundamental
one based on theory -- have been shown to be spurious, an investor may
well conclude that this is a case of knee-jerk rejection of new
technology.

And to find the real energy source (or to rule out that there is such)
would require being able to take the thing apart and examine
exhaustively every part, and the reassemble it and it still works.
That's why independent replication based on specifications is so
important.


You have tacitly assumed the device on display is faked in some way.

I don't think so.  That would be extremely dangerous.  Observers are 
allowed to come right up to it, from what I've seen in photos on the 
web.  One fortuitous discovery by a suspicious observer, and their whole 
house of cards would be down around their ankles.  If they're caught 
faking the power source, they're dead meat.  That could not ever be 
explained away.


Far smoother, far safer, is to exhibit a device which does exactly what 
it appears to do, and which gets its power exactly where it appears to 
get it, which is the battery.   There is no way an observer can 
discover anything bad about the machine, because there isn't anything 
bad to discover.


The ultimate weapon in a confidence game is not sophisticated gadgetry 
or dazzling special effects.  It's words.


Confidence, aka trust, is the coin of the realm here; the ultimate 
blunder in a confidence game is to do something which destroys the 
confidence of the marks.  Getting caught with a phony gadget would be 
such a blunder.



(Incidentally, if they had a hidden power source, they could publish 
battery drain and torque numbers, and show that the power out is 
conclusively higher than the power in.)

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson

Hoyt,

Can you help us (me) out here... without violating the principals of the NDA.

Can it be conclusively proven (at least beyond a reasonable amount of
doubt) that the battery is in no way connected to the actual running
of the ORBO device?

This HAS to be dealt with. This HAS to be clarified. No way around it.

Because of the suspiciously close proximity of that damned D cell, I
don’t know what to believe. What does Stoern expect other reasonable
people to believe as well!!! For the moment I have no reasonable
choice left but to remain skeptical.

Heaven help Steorn.

Help us out here.

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 11:00 AM 12/16/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:

I was running the system on smaller used batteries for days and they
remained charged even though a good number of amps were constantly
being drawn and the meter was showing 1/3rd of the amps going back
into the secondary.


Take a hint. Fine to set it up and start it with batteries, but 
batteries are tricky to monitor, they don't easily show the exact 
state of the charge. Put together a capacitor bank with enough depth 
(farads) to cover the draw phase, and charge it up to the battery 
voltage. Then once you are running, take the battery out of the 
circuit. You can then directly monitor the power storage by 
monitoring the capacitor voltage. No guessing. You will know right 
away if you are over unity, and how much, or, if you are under unity, 
exactly how much you are under unity.


The larger the capacitance, the more even the available voltage will 
be. I'd think of making it really large, so you would not want to 
directly connect the battery to the capacitor, that can melt wires! 
You'd charge through a resistor. You could make all this part of one 
circuit, with a switch on the battery, or you could eliminate the 
battery and use a power supply which you then, once the thing is 
running, disconnect.


Unless, of course, you want a demonstration that looks reasonably 
good through the idea that a battery couldn't possible last this 
long. As another pointed out, pulse charging can make batteries last 
much longer than we might expect. But a capacitor won't lie.

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread Mark Iverson

Hoyt (the Insider) Stearns wrote, :-)

The energy in the battery does not go to the kinetic energy of the rotor, it 
is used as an easy way
to modify some parameters of the device.

In watching the Launch 2009 video where some closeups and animations are shown, 
they show what looks
like a small electromagnet; a metallic cylinder with a coil of fine copper wire 
around its end that
faces the rotor.  WHAT IF that metallic cylinder is not an iron core, but is a 
permanent magnet?
This is the all PM motor, and the coil is used to 'modify some parameters' as 
Hoyt states.  In all
PM motors, the problem that must be solved is the cogging effect. Pulse these 
coils at the right
time and they cancel or reduce the cogging effect of the PM stator magnets...

Yes, agree that this demo really does not prove anything, and could have easily 
been configured
(monitoring V and I) to be more definitive...

NO, these guys are not stupid, so whatever they've done is probably well 
thought out.  Whether it's
a good strategy or not won't take more than a couple of weeks/months.

-Mark

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


At 11:08 AM 12/16/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

If they are claiming to have working all-permanent-magnet motors, 
then either they're lying, or it's the Dawn of a New Era.  You 
can't be confused about whether you have something or not, and a 
motor with *no* internal power source is not something you can 
sort of have, subject to interpretation -- you've either got it or you don't.


Well . . . as the Devil's advocate I would say you might have it for 
a while and then not have it later on. The motor might break 
inexplicably, after someone tries to improve it. Things like that 
often happen in cold fusion. The best known example is Mizuno's heat 
after death experiment. Granted, that is a very different 
phenomenon. It seems likely that it is much harder to make Mizuno's 
even happen a second time than it would be to make a second magnetic 
motor. Mizuno's 100 g cathode was cut up and destructively tested years ago.


Look, the demonstration device seems pretty simple. If all that had 
existed wrt cold fusion in 1989 was something like you described 
(after, say, a year), almost all of us would have remained very, very 
skeptical. Sure, with fragile effects, trying to improve it can 
quench it. That's why I not trying to improve it, at least not at 
first. I want to set up a reliable replication, period. I can fiddle 
with the observational techniques, look for different stuff, but I'm 
being careful about what I vary in the experiment itself. If the 
original experiment worked, mine should work as well, but I'm aware 
that *any* variation, even something that seems harmless, could cause 
a problem, and that is where I'll look first if I don't see radiation evidence.


People building revolutionary gadgets of this nature have a bad 
habit of destroying their prototypes, sometimes to re-use the parts, 
or sometimes just to make a bonfire to keep warm. (The Wright 
brothers used to burn their old gliders at Kitty Hawk, or give them 
to a women who used the cloth to make underwear. They almost burned 
the first powered airplane on December 17, 1903.)


Hoyt Stearns reports here that the people at Steorn find it easier 
to work with a machine that combines permanent magnets with 
electromagnets, because this makes modifying the prototype a snap. I 
gather that is what he means. That sounds plausible. They don't want 
to bother making a fully self-sustaining one after you have 
established they can do that, because by making partially 
self-sustaining prototypes they make more rapid progress, and learn 
more about the phenomenon.


Partially self-sustaining. Cool. But not over unity. Not what they 
are claiming to know how to do.


This has happened again and again. They are *not* reporting their 
experimental results, the results that would lead them to think they 
have found an anomaly. Partially self-sustaining is not an anomaly, 
that is normal, if the feedback is set up so that some of the 
expended energy is fed back. The real question is the magnitudes, in 
this case. Look. Make a device that uses an electric motor to pull a 
weight up a pulley. Then run a generator from the weight falling back 
down. Presto: partially self-sustaining.


Sure, if you can show that there is some excess energy in some part 
of the system, you'd have something that might be engineered into an 
over-unity device, especially if the effect is scalable. Unless, of 
course, you make some mistake in your measurements or your 
understanding of theory.


But that capacitor bank would show it. Absolutely, feedback of energy 
would lengthen the time of operation of the device. But measurements 
of rotational velocity, combined with measurements of the capacitor 
voltage, both monitored at the same time, would show what's 
happening, unless fraud is involved.



I am not saying I believe that, but it is plausible.


Anything is possible, Jed, it's a consequence of quantum mechanics. 
However, that doesn't make it likely enough to even discuss 
What's highly likely here, by this time, is fraud. The demonstration 
characteristics can only be explained, at this point, by one of two 
alternate theories. You proposed one, that they are stupid. The other 
is that they are not stupid, they are quite clever, and they have 
designed the demonstration for maximum desired effect, measured not 
by voltage and power and such details, but by the amount of money 
extracted from investors.


The deficiencies of the demonstration are entirely too obvious to 
allow the simple explanation of self-deceived stupidity, and are 
inconsistent with reports that real engineers are involved. They know 
exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it brilliantly. 
Really, you have to appreciate that.


You know very well that I won't reject experimental results based on 
theory. But there are no experimental results here. Nothing. There is 
a motor running. No variables. No controls. No data at all. Some 
diagrams that are so

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 12:07 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 11:00 AM 12/16/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:


No he didn't.  Esa Ruoho quoted rickfriedrich from the 
bedini_monopole_3 forum.  It was Rick who was experimenting with the 
Bedini motor described here, not Esa, and AFAIK Rick isn't on Vortex.


Rick's batteries are apparently magic, if I understood this quote; he 
says a good number of amps were constantly being drawn [from the 
batteries?] but the batteries remained charged; I don't understand that. 
 He must have meant something other than how I interpreted his words.



I was running the system on smaller used batteries for days and they
remained charged even though a good number of amps were constantly
being drawn and the meter was showing 1/3rd of the amps going back
into the secondary.


Take a hint. Fine to set it up and start it with batteries, but
batteries are tricky to monitor, they don't easily show the exact state
of the charge. Put together a capacitor bank with enough depth (farads)
to cover the draw phase, and charge it up to the battery voltage. Then
once you are running, take the battery out of the circuit. You can then
directly monitor the power storage by monitoring the capacitor voltage.
No guessing. You will know right away if you are over unity, and how
much, or, if you are under unity, exactly how much you are under unity.

The larger the capacitance, the more even the available voltage will be.
I'd think of making it really large, so you would not want to directly
connect the battery to the capacitor, that can melt wires! You'd charge
through a resistor. You could make all this part of one circuit, with a
switch on the battery, or you could eliminate the battery and use a
power supply which you then, once the thing is running, disconnect.

Unless, of course, you want a demonstration that looks reasonably good
through the idea that a battery couldn't possible last this long. As
another pointed out, pulse charging can make batteries last much longer
than we might expect. But a capacitor won't lie.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 12:35 PM, Mark Iverson wrote:

Hoyt (the Insider) Stearns wrote, :-)

The energy in the battery does not go to the kinetic energy of the rotor, it 
is used as an easy way
to modify some parameters of the device.

In watching the Launch 2009 video where some closeups and animations are shown, 
they show what looks
like a small electromagnet; a metallic cylinder with a coil of fine copper wire 
around its end that
faces the rotor.  WHAT IF that metallic cylinder is not an iron core, but is a 
permanent magnet?
This is the all PM motor, and the coil is used to 'modify some parameters' as 
Hoyt states.  In all
PM motors, the problem that must be solved is the cogging effect. Pulse these 
coils at the right
time and they cancel or reduce the cogging effect of the PM stator magnets...


And as someone here observed many months ago (Terry, maybe?), if it 
takes less energy to get over a hump in the cog than you gain back 
when you slide down the other side of the hump, then you can just hook 
the thing up to a big flywheel and dispense with the electromagnet.


If you *can't* do that, if a flywheel just doesn't do the job and the 
motor always slows down and stops when a flywheel is substituted for the 
electromagnets, then it's a very safe bet that it's under unity.


Incidentally, the problem which must be solved in all PM motors is 
conservation of energy.  Interactions of permanent magnets are 
conservative, which makes it ... shall we say ... *difficult* to build a 
motor out of them.  (Trying to get energy out of interactions between 
permanent magnets by carefully choosing the approach and retreat paths 
is a lot like trying to milk energy out of the difference between two 
derivatives, where the two values are obtained by taking the partials in 
a different order ... trouble is, they commute, and there isn't any 
difference...)


Unless someone comes up with evidence that EM fields don't superpose 
linearly, all PM motors are non-starters, because the fundamental 
interactions between moving charges and permanent dipoles are 
conservative, and summing a bunch of conservative forces leaves you with 
a conservative force.  See, for instance:


http://physicsinsights.org/magnetic_motors_1.html




Yes, agree that this demo really does not prove anything, and could have easily 
been configured
(monitoring V and I) to be more definitive...

NO, these guys are not stupid, so whatever they've done is probably well 
thought out.  Whether it's
a good strategy or not won't take more than a couple of weeks/months.


They'll draw it out a lot longer than that, I'm quite sure.

I would bet a great deal that at the end of this demonstration, some 
time in January, things will be every bit as murky as they are today. 
Nothing will be revealed, nothing will be resolved.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson

Regarding recent comments made by Hoyt Stearns:

...

 Their strategy is rather bizarre, but in a way I think it is
 ingenious for many reasons (speculative):

 They must prove that their techniques are not obvious to anyone
 skilled in the art for patentability, even though they are
 extremely simple.

 They have released many clues over the years, and still no one has
 conclusively made a self runner ( except one person who was unable
 to repeat his experiment after trying to optimize it ).

 They must avoid serious attention of the Men In Black. This is
 a delicate balancing act.


I’m reminded of a great move “The Verdict” starring the late Paul
Newman as a has-been down and out of his luck lawyer forced to feed
off the bereaved at funeral homes. In the movie there was a classic
comment uttered by another equally seedy lawyer. I gather the “advice”
being dispensed is a cross examination tactic most defense/prosecution
lawyers must know by heart:

Never ask a question of a witness on the stand for which you don’t
already know the answer.

* * *

So, what does STEORN know, and when did Steorn know it? ;-)

Hoyt, please correct me if I’m wrong here but you seem to be implying
that Steorn may be deliberately attempting to “herd” all the rabid
skeptics and debunkers down a particular line of reasoning, and then
at the right moment, go in “for the kill.”

According to this “theory”, it seems to me that Steorn would have to
have actively speculated that they knew using the D cell on the
contraption would immediately draw significant criticism and yells of
“fraud!” from all the card-carrying disbelievers. It also implies to
me that, in order to execute an effective “kill” Steorn would have to
ALREADY have the equivalent of another prototype in hiding, a
prototype that they plan on rolling out at a pregnant moment of public
scrutiny, a prototype that clearly does NOT have a “D” cell
configuration, a new prototype that clearly is not getting any
external electrical energy from such an obviously prosaic source.

Such a planned tactic would have to attempt to control and funnel all
the active debunking criticism down a very specific shoot of
“reasoning”. Lead them all down to the ol’slaughter house, and then at
the right moment, whack them over the head. Hopefully, they’ll never
know what hit them! ;-)

Ok... back to Earth, Steve!

While this is obviously outlandish speculation on my part, in fact
speculation that seems to break the basic sensibilities of Occam’s
Razor, it is a potential tactic that is not entirely unheard of. I’m
sure variations have been executed many times within certain
international CIA operations. It COULD be extremely effective if
everyone knows the role they must play and WHEN to speak their lines
clearly.

Maybe it will work. Or maybe not. I think it would be a very dangerous
game to play, particularly for those inexperienced in playing the game
of trying to control (funnel) all the major lines of skeptical
reasoning to a very specific point where it can be destroyed, utterly.
Based on Steorn’s past record, specifically the failed 2007
demonstration, their operations seemed to indicate they weren’t
terribly skilled at the game of manipulating public opinion to their
favor.

I hope Steorn has done their homework when it comes to running covert
operations. ;-)

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread Terry Blanton

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 2:01 PM, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson
svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote:


 I hope Steorn has done their homework when it comes to running covert
 operations. ;-)

Obviously not.  They are swapping out units every few hours.  The
Village of the Banned are tracking the swap outs in this thread:

begin

Steorn: Orbo swap tracking
Bottom of Page

1 to 10 of 12

   1.
  * CommentAuthorblueletter
  * CommentTime2 hours ago edited
   quote# 1
  Track the Orbo machine swaps here. Identified from From camera 2:

  Shelf 1 = 1 O'Clock machine
  Shelf 2 = 5 O'Clock machine (camera 1 shelf)
  Shelf 3 = 9 O'Clock machine

  Format

  Date: Date (y , m , d)
  Time: Time and TimeZone
  Shelf: 1, 2, or 3
  Tech: Physical description of tech
  Notes: Any special notes
   2.
  * CommentAuthorblueletter
  * CommentTime2 hours ago
   quote# 2
  I know there were more through the night and this morning, but
here's the first official one on this thread...



  Date: 2009-12-16
  Time: ~16:35 UTC
  Shelf: 1
  Tech: Skinny, bearded guy
  Notes: Swapped with a unit that was on the floor behind or under camera 1
   3.
  *

CommentAuthoralsetalokin
  * CommentTime1 hour ago
   quote# 3
  Too bad there doesn't seem to be a way to fingerprint each
individual machine. Do we even know how many there are? I take it that
4 is the lower limit.
   4.
  * CommentAuthorStarterKit
  * CommentTime1 hour ago
   quote# 4
  All webcams down
  Time: 18:02 UTC
   5.
  * CommentAuthorblueletter
  * CommentTime1 hour ago
   quote# 5
  Date: 2009-12-16
  Time: ~18:00 UTC
  Shelf: ?
  Tech: ?
  Notes: All streams offline
   6.
  *

CommentAuthoralsetalokin
  * CommentTime1 hour ago
   quote# 6
  Another one bites the dust.
  And another one's gone..another one's gone..
   7.
  * CommentAuthorblueletter
  * CommentTime1 hour ago edited
   quote# 7
  Date: 2009-12-16
  Time: ~18:10 UTC
  Shelf: ?
  Tech: ?
  Notes: Cameras 1 and 2 back up. Have the alligator clips in
Camera 1 been adjusted?
   8.
  *

CommentAuthoralsetalokin
  * CommentTime58 minutes ago
   quote# 8
  Or perhaps it's a different unit altogether? Since that seems to
be the pattern.
  Orbo slows, tachoman gets worried, Orbo slows further, device is
fiddled with or removed and swapped, cameras go dead and return to
life, everything is spinning happily along.
   9.
  * CommentAuthorspinner
  * CommentTime22 minutes ago
   quote# 9
  They're just warming up all the Orbos...
  In the following day, they'll not just remove batteries
completely, they'll also put all the orbos in parralel energy
producing configuration. Output will be following the n^n principle,
so expect to see the Waterways  surroundings off grid by the
Christmas

  Anyway, I've not been following this charade lately so I'd be
grateful if someone provides me with a short brief of what has
happened since the start...

  Thanks!
  10.
  * CommentAuthormaryyugo
  * CommentTime15 minutes ago
   quote# 10
  In brief, best guess as to what Steorn is has changed from
self-delusion (as per Dr. Mike) to plain fraud.

Back to Discussions Top of Page

end

So, not only are the batteries running down (obvious from the slowing
of the motors discussed in another thread) but the units seem to be
failing.  The cameras also go off line at convenient times.  What in
heck are they up to?  Too much Irish whiskey?

And yes, that Alsetalokin is the same guy from the youtube vids a few
months back.

Terry

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:


Look, the demonstration device seems pretty simple.


Many things seem simple but are not.


They don't want to bother making a fully self-sustaining one after 
you have established they can do that, because by making partially 
self-sustaining prototypes they make more rapid progress, and learn 
more about the phenomenon.


Partially self-sustaining. Cool. But not over unity. Not what they 
are claiming to know how to do.


That is not what I meant. I meant that perhaps the thing is producing 
anomalous energy, even enough to keep it rotating, but they are 
augmenting the power slightly with the battery because that happens 
to be convenient. This would be like running a cold fusion cell with 
laser stimulation, where you know that the laser input adds slightly 
to the heat, but you don't bother trying to take it into account 
because the calorimeter is not sensitive enough to detect it 
accurately during calibration. (Depending on the instrument, it can 
be harder to measure heat close to zero; the difference between 0.00 
and 0.010 can be harder to measure than 0.450 and 0.460.) That's not 
exactly cheating.


Let me repeat, I am playing devil's advocate here. I do not seriously 
believe these claims. On the other hand, there have been several 
magic magnetic motor claims over the years and I am not quite ready 
to dismiss them all.


- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 02:23 PM, Terry Blanton wrote:



So, not only are the batteries running down (obvious from the slowing
of the motors discussed in another thread) but the units seem to be
failing.  The cameras also go off line at convenient times.  What in
heck are they up to?  Too much Irish whiskey?


Conclusions:

1) They're not slick, after all.  (I was certainly wrong about that.)  I 
guess we should have guessed that from the earlier fiasco.


2) They're not all that bright, it appears.  This isn't going to 
convince anyone of anything good, and they should have at least had a 
good idea of how long their batteries would last.  Did they even test 
this design before they set up the demo?


3) There's no hidden power source.

4) Their demo is obviously totally phony.

5) This is too blatant to be self-deception.  Nobody capable of building 
a motor of any sort could be so totally retarded as these guys would 
need to be to continue believing their own nonsense with stuff like this 
going on.


6) When I said things would still be murky come the end of January, I 
was wrong.


Didn't someone have a theory that they were doing all this just to show 
how good they are at running a PR campaign?


If Steorn really does have investors, they may get into rather deep 
trouble over this -- they are surely in violation of a number of 
securities laws.  Madoff's team had no exit strategy, which I found 
nearly inexplicable.  Perhaps these folks have the same disease 
(whatever it is).


A perpmo machine built from existing novelty toys would work better 
than their demo.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 02:23 PM, Terry Blanton wrote:


What in
heck are they up to?  Too much Irish whiskey?



Does anyone here have any idea what Sean McCarthy's management style is 
like?


Is it possible that he's an autocrat who won't take no for an answer, 
and only listens to people who (pretend to) agree with him?


Since he's not, himself, a technical hotshot IIRC, that could explain a 
lot of things.


The emails from Madoff's programmers made it seem pretty clear that 
competent people will do totally dishonest things, and things which 
won't even work save in the very short run, if they're so ordered.

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread Hoyt A. Stearns Jr.

I'm on thin ice with that question, so all I can say is it is connected, but
not in the normal way.  All the battery energy is dissipated as heat, not
KE.

Hoyt

-Original Message-
From: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson [mailto:svj.orionwo...@gmail.com]

Can it be conclusively proven (at least beyond a reasonable amount of
doubt) that the battery is in no way connected to the actual running
of the ORBO device?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread Terry Blanton

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.com wrote:

 Didn't someone have a theory that they were doing all this just to show how
 good they are at running a PR campaign?

Maybe that's it; otherwise, I can't figure them out.

Why would they risk another failed demo after 2007?

Terry

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson

Terry sez:

 Didn't someone have a theory that they were doing all this just to show how
 good they are at running a PR campaign?

 Maybe that's it; otherwise, I can't figure them out.

 Why would they risk another failed demo after 2007?

I don't admit to having an answer, but I do know this theory has been
bandied about plenty of times over the years. It's also a favorite
conclusion written up at Wikipedia, the ultimate source of accurate
information! ;-)

Personally, I've never been able to buy into it as a plausible
explanation for Steorn's admittedly puzzling behavior. To my way of
thinking one would have to throw out Occam's Razor and start assuming
a lot of unproven assumptions.

What's the payoff? ...That Steorn is really good at manipulating PR?
...That they they can pull a fast one on everyone? There seems to be
an equally unproven assumption that if Steorn can pull it off that
future prospective clients will know that they, too, will be able to
cash in on Steorn's PR skills and make tons of money by hiring them to
manipulate PR to their own advantage.

Such convoluted reasoning stretches my own internal BS scale. However,
I also have to confess that having such a conclusion prominently
displayed over at Wikipedia as the preferred explanation probably
didn't help my predisposition in taking it seriously. ;-)

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 03:37 PM, Hoyt A. Stearns Jr. wrote:

I'm on thin ice with that question, so all I can say is it is connected, but
not in the normal way.  All the battery energy is dissipated as heat, not
KE.


Two things, neither one a question (I realize you're standing on thin 
ice with an NDA).


1) I hope you haven't given them any money.  If you have, I'd suggest 
that you hold off throwing any more in after it.  Honest or not, where 
I'm sitting their future doesn't look bright.  (I'm good at recognizing 
bad investments, by the way -- I loaded up on building stocks exactly at 
the peak of the market, I bought CanWest stock just before they filed 
for bankruptcy, I bought Silly Graphics stock just before they filed for 
bankruptcy ... like a moth with a lightbulb, I can spot a bad investment 
miles away ...)


2) It can be very difficult to determine exactly where the energy's 
going when looking at an electromagnet driven by either AC or pulsed DC. 
 An assertion that it's all going into heat can be easy to believe 
but the devil is always in the details with EM fields, and it's easy to 
overlook an unexpected but vital coupling between components.  So, 
beware -- any analysis of a complex system of this sort is automatically 
suspect, just because mistakes are so easy to make.


Like the rotating lever paradox of SR, a small number of components does 
not necessarily prefigure an easy analysis.





Hoyt

-Original Message-
From: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson [mailto:svj.orionwo...@gmail.com]

Can it be conclusively proven (at least beyond a reasonable amount of
doubt) that the battery is in no way connected to the actual running
of the ORBO device?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


Steven V Johnson wrote:


What's the payoff? ...That Steorn is really good at manipulating PR?


No. On the contrary, they seem really, really bad at PR!



...That they they can pull a fast one on everyone?


Heck, I would be surprised if they can pull a fast one on anyone, 
never mind everyone.


These people appear to be incompetent. So are many others in the 
over-unity energy business. That would explain just about everything. 
Whether they are sincere or conducting a scam, either way, they are 
doing a terrible job.


- Jed

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-16 Thread Hoyt A. Stearns Jr.



Only Steorn's people know what the plans are, but many of us think that
their activities are carefully orchestrated and they're keeping to the plan,
as bizarre as it seems ( but I sure wish it had been a whole helluva lot
faster ).

Steorn is definitely keeping a low, sometimes misleading profile.

Speculation:  Imagine that fortuitously (which it was) you discover that
magnetic fields really aren't conservative in spite of what you learned in
college ( or due to Noether's theorm ( conservation laws don't apply in time
varying systems )), and Sv ( Magnetic viscosity ) ( Time delay between an
applied H field to a ferromagnetic material, and the material's domain
response to it ).

I look at the anomalies as emergent properties of highly non-linear time
varying systems that are effectively unanalyzeable.

There would be an infinite number of embodyments that could make use of that
knowledge.

So how does a company make a profit with such a basic piece of knowledge?

If it was just summarily proved, the Chinese et al. would immediately start
producing products making use of the knowledge, and it would be the end of
the game for Steorn ( Once something is shown to be possible, everyone and
their relatives get involved e.g. nuclear devices ).

In any case, I have seen numerous configurations of their permanent magnet
motor designs, but Steorn has never actually shown one working to us except
for the Knapen Kinetron video, but they have been hand holding ( hand
waving ) us through the theory.

The NDA does not permit revealing the contents of the NDA  ( It's a meta-NDA
:-)  ),
however I feel free to discuss anything I've already seen publicly revealed.

They'll let you sign one too if you want, they'll let anyone have one (
unless you have a particularly unsavory past :-) ).


I'll just be patient, as hard as it is to do that.


-Original Message-
From: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson [mailto:svj.orionwo...@gmail.com]

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/16/2009 04:30 PM, Hoyt A. Stearns Jr. wrote:



Only Steorn's people know what the plans are, but many of us think that
their activities are carefully orchestrated and they're keeping to the plan,
as bizarre as it seems ( but I sure wish it had been a whole helluva lot
faster ).

Steorn is definitely keeping a low, sometimes misleading profile.

Speculation:  Imagine that fortuitously (which it was) you discover that
magnetic fields really aren't conservative in spite of what you learned in
college


But I didn't learn that in college.  (The old you are a trained seal 
attack...)


In college I learned that B fields do no work, which is rather 
different, and, what's more, patently false (but it's amazing how many 
physicists who ought to know better will stubbornly stick to that mantra).


A long time later, I learned that the action of a B field is 
conservative when I worked through the equations and found that forces 
on a fixed dipole in a B field can be modeled as the gradient of a 
potential.  Combined with the model of the action of B fields on 
electromagnets, which can also be shown to be conservative, we can 
arrive at the conclusion that any system of E and B fields will behave 
conservatively ... IF they superpose linearly.




( or due to Noether's theorm ( conservation laws don't apply in time
varying systems )), and Sv ( Magnetic viscosity ) ( Time delay between an
applied H field to a ferromagnetic material, and the material's domain
response to it ).

I look at the anomalies as emergent properties of highly non-linear time
varying systems that are effectively unanalyzeable.


The trouble with this notion is that, if the fields superpose linearly 
(as theory says, and as an awful lot of experiments show that they do), 
then all you need to know is that the individual entities interact 
conservatively, and you can conclude that the whole object will also 
behave conservatively, even if the interactions are so complicated that 
you can't analyze all the details.  I.e., as long as the fields 
superpose linearly, there won't be any real anomalies.


The system also isn't really time-varying.  You have the same set of 
particles throughout the whole operation, and they're generating the 
same set of fields the whole time; they're just moving around relative 
to each other.  You never turn on or turn off any of the fields 
involved.


It's like the Solar System.  It's far too complex to be fully analyzed, 
but using Newton's laws, we can still conclude that energy will be 
conserved in the interactions of the planets, because it's conserved 
pairwise and because the interactions add linearly.


It's only if the fields superpose nonlinearly that the system will 
really behave in a nonlinear (and essentially unpredictable) manner. 
Gravitational interactions as modeled in GR, for instance, are 
astonishingly hard to figure out, because the GR model is indeed 
nonlinear -- unlike Newtonian gravity, or EM fields.





There would be an infinite number of embodyments that could make use of that
knowledge.

So how does a company make a profit with such a basic piece of knowledge?

If it was just summarily proved, the Chinese et al. would immediately start
producing products making use of the knowledge, and it would be the end of
the game for Steorn ( Once something is shown to be possible, everyone and
their relatives get involved e.g. nuclear devices ).

In any case, I have seen numerous configurations of their permanent magnet
motor designs, but Steorn has never actually shown one working to us except
for the Knapen Kinetron video, but they have been hand holding ( hand
waving ) us through the theory.


That would disturb me.  (I mean, the bit about never actually showing 
a working model.)





The NDA does not permit revealing the contents of the NDA  ( It's a meta-NDA
:-)  ),
however I feel free to discuss anything I've already seen publicly revealed.

They'll let you sign one too if you want, they'll let anyone have one (
unless you have a particularly unsavory past :-) ).


No thanks.





I'll just be patient, as hard as it is to do that.


-Original Message-
From: OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson [mailto:svj.orionwo...@gmail.com]

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo


The missing honesty phenomenon


On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

 I would like to caution readers that this argument by Stephen A. Lawrence is
 logically invalid:

  Looking like a scammer is not good when you're trying to lure investors.
 
  Really talented con men show you everything, and convince you it means
  something other than what it really means.


 That cannot be falsified.

You're talking about science, not really about logic, which assumes
honesty on the part of all players.   If the presence of con men has
significant probability, you're not doing science anymore.  And logic
becomes fairly useless, since every single input to equations is not to
be trusted.

If every part of claims, evidence, reasoning, rules, etc. very probably
is composed of carefully-crafted lies, and the liars are smarter and more
psychologically sophisticated than we are, then we can't trust evidence
coming from that source.

I say the same thing Stephen is apparently saying:  WHERE F-E DEVICES ARE
CONCERNED, DON'T TRUST THE INVENTORS' EVIDENCE.  Assume that you're
dealing with a very intelligent version of Dennis Lee or Joe Newman.
They're guilty until proven innocent.  Distrust everything they say.
Distrust even that any statement is a guaranteed lie, since telling the
truth at the right moment often pays.

In that case, what are our options?  Simple.  Same as they ever were.
Cut the evidence loose from the probable-contaminated source.  Give us an
operating Orbo.  Or better yet, get it working, then leave the building
and let us mess with it.  Scammers can never do this.  As long as Steorn
refuses to do this, they are possible scammers, possibly innocent.  They
*avoid judgement*, they keep themselves in the fuzzy realm.  They never
stick one big toe out of the fuzz.  They remain impossible-to-judge.
Nothing ever happens that lets us settle the issue.  Why?  Obviously
someone has to produce this situation.  It's very probably not an
accident.

Suppose we can't find solid evidence of dishonesty.  So instead search for
evidence of honesty.  If it's a scammer, we won't find it.

Their statements could be true, or could be deceptive rhetoric and
sophistry, but we're never sure.  We give them the benefit of the doubt
over and over and over.  We can never catch them in a lie and reliably
decide they're scammers, but we don't hear an obvious truth either.
That's the sign.  With honest people, this fuzz/smoke/impossible-to-
judge-them stuff is missing.  With honest companies, we don't have to give
them the benefit of the doubt over and over continously without end.

I've heard this effect described as living in Oz.  When you're dealing
with a profoundly dishonest person, you're now living in Oz, where nothing
is normal anymore, nothing is what it seems.  It's the opposite of the
simple clarity of an honest situation.

Or think this way: if the scam is finally revealed; if Steorn principals
suddenly vanish with all the investment money, or if they suddenly admit
that it was all a mistake from the beginning ...won't everyone insist that
Steorn displayed in great detail every bit of the behavior that scam
companies have displayed again and again and again?

Or contrarywise, if the device is finally proved real, everyone will
wonder why Steorn so carefully in great detail reproduced the actions
of someone running a scam.  Why do that?  It's just bizarre.  More
likely they're just con artists.

If you were Steorn, you'd work day and night to avoid both of the above.
You can't announce success, but you can't announce any type of permanent
failure.  So just be like all the other FE scammers; just keep
researching.  Never stop the work.  Keep the money flowing, but let the
situation slowly change.  The first group of 'marks' might complain ...but
there never will be a large group of them who all suddenly complains at
the same time.  Most important: GIVE REFUNDS.  Only a small group will
demand their money back.  Keep researching, that way nothing ever
triggers a significant group of people to decide it's a con, and come
after you.


 By that standard it is impossible to distinguish
 an honest inventor who is showing everything from a con-man who is only
 pretending to show everything.

Easy: remove the source of possible dishonesty: wide replication.  Or at
the very least, independent 3rd party testing.  Con artists won't do
either of these.  But con artists have to avoid being found out.
Therefore they have to maintain sensible excuses for lack of outside
testing and replication.  We hear the excuses, and we once again give them
the benefit of the doubt. Don't listen to those excuses.  An honest
company wouldn't pull this crap, and wouldn't need those excuses.

 Every step the inventor takes to bolster his bona fides also bolsters
 the likelihood he is a con-man.

Not at all.  By publishing full information allowing replication?  By
building working copies and sending them out to universities?  By selling
the device as a

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

 If it can be shown conclusively that the battery is connected only to
 the control electronics,

Why mess with such complexity?  Just put a stupid frikn supercap in
there, and measure the voltage.  Here, I have five different kinds in a
box here.  Two minutes work.  End of story.

  and it does not power the motor, then it
 might as well be a D cell battery. For that matter, it might as well
 be a DC power supply.

In an area were scams were rare, that would work fine.   In FE business,
Steorn is a guilty scammer until they prove their innocence through
obvious and continuing honest behavior.

 For now, I think a D cell is not a big issue. There are so many ways
 to fake it, and they have done such a poor job of presenting the
 device, the battery hardly affects their credibility.

That poor job...  since we're dealing with a scammer-ridden topic
area, we should consider whether it's really carefully-crafted to appear
like a poor job.

Frankly, if Steorn was a major user of vortex-L, I'd have thrown them
off after seeing enough of the fuzzy smokescreen behavior.  They're
behaving very much like Doctor Stiffler: no very obvious dishonesty, but
a huge glaring lack of honesty.



(( ( (  (   ((O))   )  ) ) )))
William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

 In fact they claimed this back before their earlier demo, which was
 supposed to show just such a motor, if I recall correctly; however, it
 didn't.

We expected them to finally at long last prove in a simple manner that the
device is real.  We wait for the announcement and videos.  But then
...they don't?!  What?  IT CONTAINS A BATTERY?  WTF ARE THOSE ASSHOLES
TOTALTY FREEKING INSANE?!!!

Oh, sorry I forgot.   That's just scammer behavior #8

  8. The company performs public demonstrations... but something always
  goes wrong. If it's a scam, then the failure was planned all along.
  When the inventor starts a demonstration, watch for the failure which
  excuses the inventor from having to actually prove the device. Or more
  rarely, the demonstration is simple fraud, such as a hidden power
  supply, or something similar to water-to-gasoline chemistry
  demonstrations where the stirring spoon has a wax plug which melts and
  releases the gasoline from a hidden pocket.

So the failure was to inadvertently include a battery.  A battery. In a
FE demonstration.  Oops.  It was by accident.  They have a good excuse.
Really.

After seeing that, some people might give Steorn...  the benefit of the
doubt.  I bet that's the 30th time they gave it. (After all, if you
or I were building that demo device, we'd think nothing of including a
battery, right?  NOoo!)

Oh, here's another one.  Scammers don't only take investors.  They need to
separate marks from their money, so they also do things to get thousands
of people to send them smaller amounts of money.  Sell expensive plans
(which all the small disgusting normal people can't afford.)  Let them
join an insider club that gives out secret info that the unwashed rabble
never sees.

7. It's NOT the company's number one goal to prove that the invention is
  real. The scam company seems to have no goal besides creating an aura of
  attractive secrets: secrets which will only be revealed to an in-group
  of superior blue-blooded investors, while we rabble on the outside are
  obviously inferior since we haven't invested and don't know the secrets.
  (It's the old treasure map trick, playing to your victim's self-
  importance.) Scamsters have all sorts of other tricks to appeal to
  snobbery or play up to the egos of investors. They also have many really
  sensible excuses for not proving that their discovery is real. But
  honest companies just sit down and prove their claims beyond any doubt
  BEFORE gathering investors. After all, its unethical to take investors'
  money for extremely questionable and totally unproven devices as if
  they were normal inventions developed by reliable companies.

I wrote that, when?  Late 2005?  Was that before Steorn's stuff?



(( ( (  (   ((O))   )  ) ) )))
William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:

 It reminds me a little of the situation with airplanes from 1905 to
 1908.

Was flying machine plagued constantly by con artists taking money from
enormous numbers of people?  I.e. was it akin to lead-into-gold alchemist
research, or known-shady used car dealerships?  Did wise investors have to
assume a scam was in progress until innocence was proven?  Did flying
machines have a large number of exposed con games in its history?

If not, then the Wrights' situation was nothing at all like Steorns, and
you're just giving them the benefit of the doubt (yet again, over and over
repeatedly.  Ask yourself why such a thing is necessary.  It's certainly
not normal business as usual.)


(( ( (  (   ((O))   )  ) ) )))
William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website
billb at amasci com http://amasci.com
EE/programmer/sci-exhibits   amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair
Seattle, WA  206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

The Steorn Demo RIG - jpeg and PDF format. check it.
http://www.steorn.com/demo/rig/

also something:
http://www.steorn.com/demo/

Visit Steorn's Orbo technology demonstration at the Waterways Ireland
Visitor Centre in Dublin What we're doing

We are delighted to announce the live demonstration of Orbo technology. As
well as streaming live to the world via steorn.com http://www.steorn.com/,
we are opening the demonstration to the public for free. Come down to the
Waterways Ireland Visitor Centre to see our technology at work.

During December there will be a series of talks about Orbo technology by
Steorn CEO, Sean McCarthy. Then in January we will be streaming the
validation and replication. Full schedule of events to follow.





On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Esa Ruoho esaru...@gmail.com wrote:

 a friend gave that, its not mine, i've never seen anything.


 On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Esa Ruoho esaru...@gmail.com wrote:

 http://i844.photobucket.com/albums/ab6/mensor_2009/steorndemo.jpg

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

http://www.steorn.com/images/rig01.pdf

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

*Latest Steorn Press Release*

Steorn is pleased to announce that public demonstrations of its
controversial Orbo technology will begin today in Dublin and continue for
the next six weeks.

Orbo technology, which has been in development for six years, provides free,
clean and constant energy at the point of use. It can be engineered to power
anything from a phone to a fridge to a car. It is controversial because it
is an over-unity technology, meaning that it produces more energy than it
consumes without the degradation of its constituent parts.

This is an apparent violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy, which
states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The implications,
not just for energy production but for society as a whole, are profound.

The public demonstrations - which will include live test and replication
sessions - will take place in the Waterways Visitor Centre, Grand Canal
Basin, Dublin. They begin today, 15th December 2009 and will run until 31st
January 2010 (with a break between December 24th and January 4th,
inclusive). The demonstrations will also be streamed live at
www.steorn.com/orbo.

This is a pivotal moment for the company, said Sean McCarthy, Steorn CEO,
and potentially, for us as a species. There exists now an opportunity to
change everything. At the end of the six week demonstration period,
developers will be able to access our technology and start the process of
developing Orbo technology-powered products. The Waterways demonstration is
the beginning of the Orbo revolution.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Esa Ruoho esaru...@gmail.com wrote:

 http://www.steorn.com/images/rig01.pdf

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/15/2009 07:45 AM, Esa Ruoho wrote:

http://www.steorn.com/images/rig01.pdf


So there's a battery in it.

So, it's not self-running; it runs from battery power.

So, what is it supposed to be, exactly?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

yeah, thats what all the dogjaws on twitter are harping on and on about.
perpetual nonsense powered by a battery. there has got to be a reason why
they just show it directly. i hope we'll figure out why eventually. i
understand that the WITTS delay line generator, for instance, requires
batteries to start the process - and then self-runs, but whats Steorn's
reason? does it get disconnected after its running - is it a self-runner?
what? i hope there's someone there who will answer these types of questions.


On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.comwrote:



 On 12/15/2009 07:45 AM, Esa Ruoho wrote:

 http://www.steorn.com/images/rig01.pdf


 So there's a battery in it.

 So, it's not self-running; it runs from battery power.

 So, what is it supposed to be, exactly?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

to see the shit-storm: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23steorn


On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Esa Ruoho esaru...@gmail.com wrote:

 yeah, thats what all the dogjaws on twitter are harping on and on about.
 perpetual nonsense powered by a battery. there has got to be a reason why
 they just show it directly. i hope we'll figure out why eventually. i
 understand that the WITTS delay line generator, for instance, requires
 batteries to start the process - and then self-runs, but whats Steorn's
 reason? does it get disconnected after its running - is it a self-runner?
 what? i hope there's someone there who will answer these types of questions.


 On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence sa...@pobox.comwrote:



 On 12/15/2009 07:45 AM, Esa Ruoho wrote:

 http://www.steorn.com/images/rig01.pdf


 So there's a battery in it.

 So, it's not self-running; it runs from battery power.

 So, what is it supposed to be, exactly?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Craig Haynie

So... if the generator recharges the battery, then why not just
disconnect the battery and run the thing with the power from the
generator?

I think it's a crock...

Craig (Houston)

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

This is the eternal argument, and the last one that people come up  
with. There appears to be an imbalance that the battery-fed circuit  
gets from the battery, that the circuit balances out and some of the  
balancing reaction is tapped for doing work. Most of these start as  
energysavings and increased efficiency. Until the tuning and re- 
modeling allows the tinkerer to go further. By the time they are  
further away in experimentation they dont take anyone seriously who  
insists on closing the loop. If Steorn are anywhere close to the other  
open-system contraptions such as what Bedini is instructing people to  
build, it just will never beclosed-loop  until what's there is studied  
seriously and no crutches are grasped for, be they fancy names for  
statistical laws or anything else that allows for an argumentative  
argument. Let's see what their (Steorn's) reasons are for requiring a  
battery. If it really is transformation that they're tapping, they'll  
have to explain away the battery-requirement like a bunch of adults.  
Of course theyll be mocked for having a battery by anyone who believes  
they're doing nothing but fooling investors.




iPoni sent dis message. Esa Ruoho wrote it.

On 15.12.2009, at 16.46, Craig Haynie cchayniepub...@gmail.com wrote:


So... if the generator recharges the battery, then why not just
disconnect the battery and run the thing with the power from the
generator?

I think it's a crock...

Craig (Houston)

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Craig Haynie

 ... Let's see what their (Steorn's) reasons are for requiring a
 battery. If it really is transformation that they're tapping, they'll have
 to explain away the battery-requirement like a bunch of adults. Of course
 theyll be mocked for having a battery by anyone who believes they're doing
 nothing but fooling investors.

We on this list, are indeed patient, but there are smoothing circuits
and capacitors which could take the power from the generator and turn
it into the equilibrium of a battery.

Craig (Houston)

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Mark Iverson

Its explained in the YouTube video,
Steorn Orbo Technology Launch 2009

The lower two rotors are a motor with PMs on the rotors and small coils 
(electromagnets?) on the
stator.  The EMs obviously require some DC electricity. The topmost rotor is a 
small generator which
produces AC.  To charge the battery they run the AC thru a very simple 
rectification circuit.  

So, yes, the motor part does require power, but apparently (much) less than 
they can generate, so it
should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept running for weeks, 
months when it should
draw down the battery in a matter of days... 

-Mark


-Original Message-
From: Craig Haynie [mailto:cchayniepub...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 7:53 AM
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

 ... Let's see what their (Steorn's) reasons are for requiring a 
 battery. If it really is transformation that they're tapping, they'll 
 have to explain away the battery-requirement like a bunch of adults. 
 Of course theyll be mocked for having a battery by anyone who believes 
 they're doing nothing but fooling investors.

We on this list, are indeed patient, but there are smoothing circuits and 
capacitors which could
take the power from the generator and turn it into the equilibrium of a battery.

Craig (Houston)

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.716 / Virus Database: 270.14.108/2566 - Release Date: 12/14/09 
23:52:00
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com 
Version: 9.0.716 / Virus Database: 270.14.108/2566 - Release Date: 12/14/09 
23:52:00

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

Sterling D. Allan weighs in. (or something).
http://pesn.com/2009/12/15/9501594_Steorn_demos_e-Orbo/


On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Mark Iverson zeropo...@charter.net wrote:

 Its explained in the YouTube video,
 Steorn Orbo Technology Launch 2009

 The lower two rotors are a motor with PMs on the rotors and small coils
 (electromagnets?) on the
 stator.  The EMs obviously require some DC electricity. The topmost rotor
 is a small generator which
 produces AC.  To charge the battery they run the AC thru a very simple
 rectification circuit.

 So, yes, the motor part does require power, but apparently (much) less than
 they can generate, so it
 should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept running for
 weeks, months when it should
 draw down the battery in a matter of days...

 -Mark


 -Original Message-
 From: Craig Haynie [mailto:cchayniepub...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 7:53 AM
 To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
 Subject: Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

  ... Let's see what their (Steorn's) reasons are for requiring a
  battery. If it really is transformation that they're tapping, they'll
  have to explain away the battery-requirement like a bunch of adults.
  Of course theyll be mocked for having a battery by anyone who believes
  they're doing nothing but fooling investors.

 We on this list, are indeed patient, but there are smoothing circuits and
 capacitors which could
 take the power from the generator and turn it into the equilibrium of a
 battery.

 Craig (Houston)

 No virus found in this incoming message.
 Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
 Version: 9.0.716 / Virus Database: 270.14.108/2566 - Release Date: 12/14/09
 23:52:00
 No virus found in this outgoing message.
 Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
 Version: 9.0.716 / Virus Database: 270.14.108/2566 - Release Date: 12/14/09
 23:52:00

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson

Personally, I just wish the damned contraption was hooked up to a
light bulb. Hell! If the thing was doing nothing more than powering a
couple of energy efficient LEDs, for several weeks straight, now THAT
would impress me more than the current battery recharging
configuration.

For me, personally, the issue of having to feed energy back into a
recharging loop raises too many red flags.

Granted, the current configuration may still be OU. If so, it seems to
me that Steorn is taking a much more convoluted path towards ultimate
vindication.

If this is all they they got to show, at least for now... well then, I
have a feeling they will have a VERY rocky road ahead for them.

Needless to say, I continue to wish them well, as well as good HONEST
fortunes. However at present, I think the jury is still out.

Regards,
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JikYfmEdF8

Steorn Orbo Technology Launch 2009

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 8:31 PM, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson
svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote:

 Personally, I just wish the damned contraption was hooked up to a
 light bulb.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,100183,39938307,00.htm

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Abd ul-Rahman Lomax


At 10:53 AM 12/15/2009, Craig Haynie wrote:

We on this list, are indeed patient, but there are smoothing circuits
and capacitors which could take the power from the generator and turn
it into the equilibrium of a battery.

Craig (Houston)


That's what I thought of immediately. A nice big fat bank of 
capacitors should be able to take the place of any battery, and one 
could monitor the voltage as a direct measure of energy consumed -- 
or stored. If this think really runs over unity, enough to be usable 
for power (I doubt it does it at all, but just allowing Steorn the 
same independence from practical demands as is necessary for cold 
fusion at this time, i.e., excess heat is shown, but not enough and 
reliably enough and for long enough to be practical for a net gain in power.


I wouldn't insist on a cup of tea, but I might insist on a clear 
demonstration of excess energy. Let it increase the voltage on a 
capacitor, steadily and repeatably, without slowing down or transfer 
of energy from some other process, and I'd be impressed. Of course, 
if the battery voltage increases, if you could use the thing as a 
battery charger, that would be a great demonstration, eh?


My question, really is: what are they smuggling? If I haven't told 
the story of Nasrudin and the donkeys and the border guard he meets 
years later, perhaps I will.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Craig Haynie

Personally, I just wish the damned contraption was hooked up to a
light bulb. Hell! If the thing was doing nothing more than powering a
couple of energy efficient LEDs, for several weeks straight, now THAT
would impress me more than the current battery recharging
configuration.

The battery is also too easy to replace, without anyone knowing.

Craig

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Abd ul-Rahman Lomax


At 12:35 PM 12/15/2009, Mark Iverson wrote:

Its explained in the YouTube video,
Steorn Orbo Technology Launch 2009

The lower two rotors are a motor with PMs on the rotors and small 
coils (electromagnets?) on the
stator.  The EMs obviously require some DC electricity. The topmost 
rotor is a small generator which
produces AC.  To charge the battery they run the AC thru a very 
simple rectification circuit.


So, yes, the motor part does require power, but apparently (much) 
less than they can generate, so it
should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept running 
for weeks, months when it should

draw down the battery in a matter of days...


That's not a demonstration of over-unity power. Suppose what the 
battery does is reduce friction in some way, reduce the heat losses, 
making it run longer. No, if they are claiming that they can generate 
energy, then we'd want to see the energy from the battery monitored 
and the generated energy monitored, and, frankly, I'd want to see the 
generated energy used to charge the battery Sure, it might take 
start-up power, but then what?


From the Toy, I get the idea that they are moving magnets in and out 
of the path of a rotating magnet and if you time this just right you 
might be able to sustain rotary movement, but it does take energy to 
do that. That might allow a rotating magnet to rotate for longer, it 
seems to me. But it would still just be trading stored energy for 
rotational energy, unless they have discovered something truly new. 
And I just don't see room for that, based on all that has come down.


I'm not going to reject Steorn just because it flies in the face of 
solidly established theory, and it certainly does that far more than 
cold fusion -- which really just contradicted a poverty of 
imagination, not actual conservation of mass/energy or momentum -- 
but that doesn't mean that I'll dump these theories because of the 
publicity-generating behavior of some seemingly slick characters. 
Steorn smells like donkey smuggling, not science. Nothing wrong with 
smuggling donkeys, in general, though they can be smelly, but someone 
who thinks there must be something valuable in the saddlbags is going 
to be disappointed.


Okay, there can be something wrong with it, if one lies about what 
one is about.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson

From Craig:

 Personally, I just wish the damned contraption was hooked
  up to a light bulb. Hell! If the thing was doing nothing
  more than powering a couple of energy efficient LEDs, for
  several weeks straight, now THAT would impress me more than
  the current battery recharging configuration.

 The battery is also too easy to replace, without anyone
 knowing.

That might be true. I freely confess that my prior rant was mostly
an emotional catharsis pertaining to my frustration of not being able
to achieve sufficient clarification. It was NOT a rational assessment
of the situation. ;-)

BTW, I think Abd's recent suggestions concerning how one might create
a more convincing demonstration are good.

Regards
Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com
www.zazzle.com/orionworks

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Jed Rothwell

The battery is puzzling, but they do not hide it, so I do not see how
it could be part of a scam.

Mark Iverson wrote:

so it should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept
running for weeks, months when it should draw down the battery in a
matter of days...

Hours, not days. Toys that operate with D batteries run out in an
hour or so. If it produces significant movement and noise I expect it
is is consuming a watt or two. The best D battery has 21 watt-hours
of energy. See:

Energy storage in D batteries

http://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.htmlhttp://www.allaboutbatteries.com/Energy-tables.html

Steven V Johnson wrote:

Personally, I just wish the damned contraption was hooked up to a
light bulb. Hell! If the thing was doing nothing more than powering a
couple of energy efficient LEDs, for several weeks straight, now THAT
would impress me more than the current battery recharging
configuration.

You mean a white LED light, not the kind used in a computer indicator
light. Those can be powered for weeks with tiny watch battery.

If the machine is moving and making noise that is enough of an
indication that it is consuming (producing?) energy. It would be nice
to have some definite indication of how much, by putting a mechanical
load on it. Something like a miniature de Prony brake. It would be an
additional mechanical load since there already is one, and it is
substantial by the standards of a D battery.

On the other hand, an analog wall clock can run with an AA battery
for a year, making a distinct ticking noise. Clockworks are extremely
efficient.

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/15/2009 01:53 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

At 10:53 AM 12/15/2009, Craig Haynie wrote:

We on this list, are indeed patient, but there are smoothing circuits
and capacitors which could take the power from the generator and turn
it into the equilibrium of a battery.

Craig (Houston)


That's what I thought of immediately. A nice big fat bank of capacitors
should be able to take the place of any battery, and one could monitor
the voltage as a direct measure of energy consumed -- or stored. If this
think really runs over unity, enough to be usable for power (I doubt it
does it at all, but just allowing Steorn the same independence from
practical demands as is necessary for cold fusion at this time,


They are totally different situations.

The CF field is packed with real scientists who are struggling along on 
shoestring budgets with little or no hope of every realizing any 
financial gain from their efforts.  It seems clear that at least some of 
the CF researchers are in it purely for knowledge.


Steorn, on the other hand, is a company founded by non-scientists, run 
by marketing people and lawyers (as I understand it), which is clearly 
out to make a profit, and which is currently getting their income from 
investors, whom they must continue to impress if they're to continue 
getting money from them.


The Steorn situation smells very bad.  That is absolutely *not* the case 
with cold fusion.




i.e.,
excess heat is shown, but not enough and reliably enough and for long
enough to be practical for a net gain in power.

I wouldn't insist on a cup of tea, but I might insist on a clear
demonstration of excess energy. Let it increase the voltage on a
capacitor, steadily and repeatably, without slowing down or transfer of
energy from some other process, and I'd be impressed. Of course, if the
battery voltage increases, if you could use the thing as a battery
charger, that would be a great demonstration, eh?

My question, really is: what are they smuggling? If I haven't told the
story of Nasrudin and the donkeys and the border guard he meets years
later, perhaps I will.

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo




On 12/15/2009 02:09 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:

The battery is puzzling, but they do not hide it, so I do not see how it
could be part of a scam.

Mark Iverson wrote:


so it should be easy to demonstrate that this thing could be kept
running for weeks, months when it should draw down the battery in a
matter of days...


Hours, not days. Toys that operate with D batteries run out in an hour
or so.


Wrong comparison.  D-cell powered toys are typically doing significant 
work.  On the other hand, small induction motors that do nothing but 
rotate do *not* run down a small battery in an hour or so.  These things 
have been desktop novelties for a long time -- the ones I've seen 
typically had one moving part which just ran back and forth across a 
track.  With very low friction, and almost no losses except air 
resistance, they can keep going for a very long time.


See, for instance, this site (these aren't what I was thinking of; 
they're far fancier than the old metal-and-plastic spinning rotor 
desktop novelties; none the less they're the same idea):


http://www.allwaze.com/woodcraft-hover.htm

Quote from the blurb on the page:


Batteries are used to overcome the air friction losses and simply give
the moving arm a 'kick' each time it passes the base. Each Levitating
Motion Sculpture takes four AA batteries, and will continue to rotate
from several months to a year,


Sounds about like the battery life Steorn is claiming -- and 1 D cell, 
ala Steorn, may be worth 3 or 4 AA cells, depending on the battery 
technology.



If it produces significant movement and noise


Who said anything about noise?

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Abd ul-Rahman Lomax


At 01:37 PM 12/15/2009, Esa Ruoho wrote:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,100183,39938307,00.htm


From that page:

The device is powered by a large 10,000 mAH 1.2v nickel metal 
hydride rechargeable battery. Steorn says that this is recharged by 
the device itself, but has not included any metering or other 
instrumentation that would show this. Without any information about 
the device's own power consumption, it is impossible to tell whether 
this is happening, nor whether the battery is sufficient to keep the 
device rotating for the duration of the demonstration without Steorn's claims.


In other words, the demonstration demonstrates nothing. Nada. Zilch. 
Steorn is saying, essentially, Trust us!


But they are providing no evidence to trust, only claims without 
specificity. Why? If they have evidence that this is over-unity, 
surely an examination of the circuitry and the exact operating 
parameters of the device, with measurements of rotational velocity, 
battery voltage with time, and all that, would show it. Absolutely, 
it's possible that there is excess energy -- if excess energy is 
possible -- but that the efficiency is still too low to maintain 
function, but what's the reason for believing that there is excess 
energy here? Because Steorn says so? But I mean for *Steorn* to believe it.


We know that cold fusion researchers persisted because they saw 
events that convinced them, that they could not explain with ordinary 
chemistry. That wasn't enough to convince others, because of the lack 
of reproducibility, but it was enough to keep them going. Cold fusion 
remains a fragile effect, very difficult to reproduce except possibly 
under certain conditions (I'm hoping that codeposition does turn out 
to be relatively easy to reproduce; it seems to be that way from the 
reports of quite a few who have tried it, but I also get buzz of 
failed replications, so that's my work, to find out and to make 
reproduction reliable, very purely and simply.)


So, the possibilities:

They have an over-unity device, they believe, but they haven't proven 
it. They need more money, so they hope to bring in some suckers, er, 
investors to provide it. But why do they believe they have an 
over-unity device, if they haven't actually demonstrated it? What's 
the basis for the belief? Theory? Now, wouldn't that be ironic? It's 
over-unity because our theory is really cool, wait till you see it, 
it's intuitively obvious that it is correct. At least it is to any 
smart people like us. Scientists stuck in their outmoded theories may 
not be able to see it


They have an over-unity device, and they have the evidence. If so, 
why not show it? The difficulty of obtaining patents for something 
like this? It would even be possible to show the evidence without 
revealing the Secret. You'd do it with a Black Box as part of the 
demonstration. People would be able to see the Black Box, and its 
contents. But not the actual arrangement of those contents when it 
was in working order. With the right design, this could be a 
convincing demonstration even if all details were not known, just 
that the unknown details were not ones that could conceivably produce 
the results unless existing theory is incorrect. For example, take 
that battery out, what's there? A pile of coils and stuff that 
couldn't produce sustained rotary motion that runs over unity 
(presumably it can accelerate without energy input, but we really 
don't care what happens in the black box as long as it doesn't 
contain a traditional power source.


So you put all kinds of instrumentation on the battery and observe 
some parameter from the black box, like rotational velocity over time.


Last possibility, they have no over-unity device and they know it. 
They are selling something else, like their ability to generate buzz. 
Or they are seeking money to abscond with. Or they simply like the 
publicity, seeing how long they can pull everyone's chain. 
Apparently, quite a long time *even if the device is real.* Because 
they haven't proven it publicly in all these years, yet they still 
gain attention. Rationally, they would have exhausted everyone's 
patience long ago.


Note how thoroughly different this is from low-energy nuclear 
reactions. There were some secrets in the early days (look how 
effective that was!). But there has been demonstration after 
demonstration, many, from many different research groups and many 
approaches, including exact replications, or more general 
replications. Excess heat and helium have been reliably correlated. 
Radiation is detected; the autoradiographs of palladium cathodes from 
BARC are stunning in their implications. The neutron results from 
SPAWAR are extremely difficult to dismiss as artifact. Some of these 
results might indeed ultimately be red herrings, but the *scientific 
consensus* is, by now, that there is a real anomaly here, worthy of 
study, and that excess energy (not over unity energy,

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Terry Blanton

It's a freakin' Bedini motor.

Geeze.

RE: [Vo]:Steorn Demo

2009-12-15 Thread Jed Rothwell


I wrote:

It would be nice to have some definite indication of how much, by 
putting a mechanical load on it. Something like a miniature de Prony brake.


I mean that since the machine produces mechanical motion, it makes 
sense to measure that directly, rather than -- say -- converting it 
to electricity which is then converted to light. The fewer steps, the better.


You can also use it to run a pulley and lift a small weight, using 
fishing line.


- Jed

Re: [Vo]:Steorn Demo