Re: [Vo]:Is global warming unstoppable?
On 28/11/09 10:55 PM, Horace Heffner wrote: http://www.physorg.com/news178178343.html http://tinyurl.com/ylcn43s Selected quotes: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization. I am reminded of a discussion we had many years ago with some folks who were developing a parallel computer which used many microprocessors on cards interconnected across a switch (something new in those days). We asked how you stopped the whole machine in the event of a single process encountering an error. You can't do that we were told. It's not possible to stop the whole thing at once. I relayed this information to my boss, who laughed and said, BS. Of course you can. Kick the plug out of the wall -- it all stops! So, we *know* you can do it -- now all we need to do is fine a more elegant mechanism. In the case of policy decisions -- well, major wars have been fought, or avoided, as a result of such decisions. I'd say major wars pretty clearly have the capacity to change the course of civilization. And so, we have an existence proof: Policy decisions *can* affect the course of civilization, and the assertion quoted above is obviously false. Thus, we can set aside the blanket denial and look at the actual question, which is at what level, and to what degree, can policy decisions have an impact, and how can we maximize the impact in ways we want to see? Remember, Hari Seldon was fictitious, and in fact his creation resulted in a contradiction: His own singular actions changed the course of civilization in a way that consideration of human behavior en masse could not have predicted. His existence disproved his hypothesis.
Re: [Vo]:OT (sort of): 2000-2009: the 21 Century decade of Extraordinary claims?
On 28/11/09 12:54 PM, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote: Not surprisingly, few within the Vort Collective (and elsewhere) give much credence to STEORN's claims, particularly after the disastrous Kinetica Museum demonstration flop conducted several years ago. I myself have yet to reconcile within myself how STEORN's engineers could have gotten as far as they claim to have gotten with their alleged ORBO technology, but then not have pre-tested the prototype within the same harsh environment where it would go on public display. Speaking of engineers within dubious businesses, I don't know if folks here noticed the report that two programmers (high level types, middle aged, from the pictures) have been nailed in the Madoff mess. Old notes and emails indicate they hated the scheme, but went ahead and wrote the software that made it all possible anyway. This may be relevant to forming a clearer picture of how the STEORN engineers could have messed up so badly. Madoff's programmers apparently also didn't grasp the fact that all Ponzi schemes are mathematically guaranteed to collapse, and you *must* have an exit strategy if you're going to run such a thing -- and so they are going to jail also. This scam was certainly not a one-man show run by Madoff. The scheme was quite complex, with multiple sets of records and enormous numbers of fictitious trades being generated to fool the regulators and the public, and apparently involved a substantial number of people in the organization -- far, far more than just Madoff alone. It continues to escape me how multiple well-educated intelligent people within Madoff's organization could have completely overlooked the fact that they were doing something which had a 100% chance of being discovered, and so they were setting themselves up for a major fall. We can speculate about reasons why Madoff himself didn't get out before it was too late, but all the alleged explanations but one seem to break down when we try to apply them to a whole cadre of people. The one explanation that seems to hold water when applied to a substantial 'gang' is galloping innumeracy -- they really didn't understand the math of what they were doing, and didn't realize that it was flatly impossible for them to keep it up indefinitely.
Re: [Vo]:OT (sort of): 2000-2009: the 21 Century decade of Extraordinary claims?
In regards to STEORN, I sez: ... I myself have yet to reconcile within myself how STEORN's engineers could have gotten as far as they claim to have gotten with their alleged ORBO technology, but then not have pre-tested the prototype within the same harsh environment where it would go on public display. In regards to MADOFF, Stephen sez: ... It continues to escape me how multiple well-educated intelligent people within Madoff's organization could have completely overlooked the fact that they were doing something which had a 100% chance of being discovered, and so they were setting themselves up for a major fall. We can speculate about reasons why Madoff himself didn't get out before it was too late, but all the alleged explanations but one seem to break down when we try to apply them to a whole cadre of people. The one explanation that seems to hold water when applied to a substantial 'gang' is galloping innumeracy -- they really didn't understand the math of what they were doing, and didn't realize that it was flatly impossible for them to keep it up indefinitely. That's as good an explanation I've heard so far. Here's my take on Madoff: Perhaps he realized there really was no place for him to run. His scheme has produced so much outrage that I suspect he realized he would have been hunted down and burned at the stake had he tried to run. Due to the severity of his crimes, no corner of the planet would have been safe to hide out in. And he's not getting any younger. Personally, I suspect Madoff's decision to face the music was quite calculated. Once he realized he wasn't going to be able to out-live his scheme, living within the relatively safe confines of a United States run state penitentiary, getting three meals a day, and free health care paid by the state may have started to look like the most viable option left in which to live out his final golden years. As for STEORN's engineers... Due to what appears to be a deliberate news blackout of sorts, I'm unable to speculate. I'm content to sit back and watch this little drama unfold. I must confess that I continue to wish beyond all logical reason that STEORN still might have a rabbit to pull out of a hat, but hey, hope is cheap, especially when one doesn't have any financial stake in the business! Shoot! What a hoot it would be if they could actually pull it off. Let's see if December comes and passes with or without a whimper. ;-) Not betting the farm on it... Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Simon is a *sociologist,* Jed, not a chemist or physicist. Opinions (especially collective opinions) and process are what the book is about, not cold fusion. Or calorimetry. If it is about opinions then we can conclude that opinions have no bearing on cold fusion. Plus we can conclude that sociologists are unqualified to write about calorimetry, and they make fools of themselves when they try. Anyway, I also disagree with Simon with regard to opinions and philosophy of science. Is it your position, Jed, that the press conference was beyond any reproach? Not a mistake? I do not think it was a mistake. I think it was necessary to call a press conference. They did the best they could, and I doubt anyone could have done a better job. These people were on the losing side of history. They were doomed, as Fleischmann well knew. It is easy to criticize people who are stuck in that situation, such as an unpopular candidate running in an election he cannot win. Any miss-step they make is apparent because it triggers dire consequences. Whereas a person on a roll, who has everything going for him, can make mistakes without causing avalanches of problems. Regarding Labinger, he told me that my critique is unfair because his paper is about the philosophy of science, or sociology of science, and he is merely using cold fusion as an example. He feels he is not passing judgement on it, and that my technical critiques do not apply. I expect Simon would say the same sort of thing, this book is not about the science per se. But I say it is about the science. It has to be, because the two topics cannot be separated. And in any case, these authors did not try to separate them. They piled on with the winning side. I wrote to Labinger: . . . You are not only making assertions about the philosophy of science. You have gone far beyond that to make technical assertions. Such as: No cold fusion researcher has been able to dispel the stigma of 'pathological science' by rigorously and reproducibly demonstrating effects sufficiently large to exclude the possibility of error . . . This is nonsense. Thousands of cold fusion researchers have done this. No skeptic has challenged their results. Saying that tritium at 50 times background is not sufficiently large to exclude the possibility of error is preposterous. The researchers would be dead if this were an error, contamination being the only plausible source of error on this scale. God only knows I have read these same arguments many times before, and so have the cold fusion researchers. . . . You have described the situation mainly from the skeptical point of view, which exaggerates the difficulties and makes the results seem far less certain than they are. You have made grave technical errors regarding the science itself. I wish you had asked an expert to review the manuscript. Actually, I agree with the philosophy of science parts. If the facts about cold fusion were as you describe, and tritium at 50 times background was marginal, then you would be right about the rest. - Jed
[Vo]:Time dilation in a suppressed Microverse
Many papers associate vacuum fluctuations with time dilation during pair anti pair production but this is a balanced system so small and fleeting as to appear isotropic to an observer at our scale. Einstein concluded that time is dilated or always moves slower in a volume that contains a different energy content reflecting what Gamma quantifies as a ratio between different inertial frames when that delta approaches luminal velocity. These luminal velocities also occur in the Microverse of radial orbits our electrons experience. In flat space without a waveguide or cavity to suppress the ZPF this orbital Microverse is essentially in a common isotropic field / inertial frame. When these orbitals are diffused into a cavity that suppresses some of these fluctuations the total energy is reduced and time dilation occurs translating the orbital into a different inertial frame where the orbital velocity C appears to take on fractional values from 2-137 as calculated by Bourgoin.
Re: [Vo]:Labinger paper, more detailed commentary.
I wrote: If it is about opinions then we can conclude that opinions have no bearing on cold fusion. Plus we can conclude that sociologists are unqualified to write about calorimetry, and they make fools of themselves when they try. To put it more charitably, I guess what I am saying is that an analysis based on sociology alone can only go so far. At some point you have to have subject-specific knowledge. Let me illustrate this with an example from anthropology, which I know a lot more about than sociology. In college I took several semesters of anthropology, as you might expect relating to Asia: India, China and Japan. This was a narrow specialty so there usually a dozen grad students and undergrads. The grad students had years of anthropology in various other societies and periods which gave them some advantages. They already knew that there a range of different ways of classifying relatives or paying for a new barn. In China or Japan they have a rotating loan to village members and they also used to turn out the whole village to help major construction (roof raising), the way American farmers used to do. If you want to understand the dynamics of traditional agriculture in Japan, general knowledge of anthropology is helpful. But knowing conditions on the ground in rural Japan, and knowing how to speak Japanese is a whole lot more helpful! I found it even helped in understanding China, although the two countries are as different as England and Italy, and I speak no Chinese. My point is, you cannot divorce the study of anthropology from a specific culture, place and time. It is never about things in general, but always about how people act in some decade in some country. The sociology of science may indeed have broad themes that can be discovered by examining specific incidents, but you cannot sort out these themes without some minimum understanding the technical aspects of whatever branch of science you are using as a test case. Someone who thinks that tritium at 50 times background is a disputable result has no basis to judge what is claimed, and no way of knowing who is blowing smoke up your ass, as it were. It would be like trying to figure out pre-1965 Japanese agriculture if you had no idea how rice is grown. If you did not know rice requires water paddies (which are communal by nature), or the fact that until the 1970s it could not be mechanized, and if you did not have other specific, mundane, on-the-ground factual knowledge, you would be confused. You would not grasp why people did things the way they did. You would come up with outlandish theories to explain behavior that is no mystery to someone who knows how people grow rice. This goes for history and many other subjects, and also experimental science, much more than theoretical science. Knowing how calorimeters work -- and how they fail -- gives you insight into what is taking so long in cold fusion. In Italy, someone asked Mike McKubre why don't you look for helium more often? He said: Because you have to seal the cell perfectly and leave it sealed for weeks, and the day after you seal it, a wire breaks. I can relate to that! It is much more demanding than regular closed cell electrochemistry -- which is demanding enough. That's one of the reasons Miles used the method of capturing effluent gas for a relatively short period of time. (Incidentally, if you want to learn a lot about how rice was grown traditionally in Japan, see the movie Seven Samurai. It is gift of future undergrad anthropologists. It is probably the most authentic portrayal of pre-modern Japanese agriculture ever made, or that ever will be made, because those people in 1954 still had one foot in the pre-modern era.) - Jed
