Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 9:01 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: No, you got it wrong again. To use your dice analogy, it is as if someone went ahead and rolled the dice 6*14,720 times and they yielded 14,720 hits. But along comes a skeptic who says that all of those hits were misreads. The chance of those misreads is 1/3 (If you want to establish that the chance is higher, then make the case for it -- but it has never happened, ever before, in the history of science). So in order for all those 14,720 hits to be errors, it would be (1/3)^14720, which is the figure that puts you off by 5000 orders of magnitude. No, man. You're doing it wrong. The chance you're calculating is if they made exactly 14720 experiments, and all of them hit. If they made 3*1470 experiments, and the chance of a misread is 1/3, then you would *expect* something close to 1470 hits.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:22 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.comwrote: What it represents is the probability that ALL of the replications were the result of error. It is exceedingly small. No. That would be the result if there were no negative results in between. If you throw N dice, the chance they all come up 6 is (1/6)^N. But if you throw 6N dice, on average N will come up 6. So, if the chance is 1/3 that you get a false positive excess heat, and 1/3 of cold fusion experiments show heat, then they could all be by chance, no matter how big N is. When you make insipid arguments based on unjustifiable assumptions, you should at least try to get the math right. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 7:23 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That is a form of Bayesian analysis, I think. No it's not. It's just ordinary probability theory, and it's not even right. That calculation gives the probability of getting N *consecutive* replications. The probability of rolling 6 on an ordinary die is 1/6, but it's easy to get N sixes (on average) just by throwing the die 6N times. It is the need for these sorts of arguments and Bayesian analysis that emphasizes the absence of a single experiment that will give an expected result.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
No, you got it wrong again. To use your dice analogy, it is as if someone went ahead and rolled the dice 6*14,720 times and they yielded 14,720 hits. But along comes a skeptic who says that all of those hits were misreads. The chance of those misreads is 1/3 (If you want to establish that the chance is higher, then make the case for it -- but it has never happened, ever before, in the history of science). So in order for all those 14,720 hits to be errors, it would be (1/3)^14720, which is the figure that puts you off by 5000 orders of magnitude. When you make insipid arguments based on unjustifiable assumptions, you should at least try to get the math right. ***You are the one with insipid arguments and your math is wrong. By thousands of orders of magnitude. Also, you're engaging in debunking and sneering, which are against the rules. You haven't got anything right. On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:22 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.comwrote: What it represents is the probability that ALL of the replications were the result of error. It is exceedingly small. No. That would be the result if there were no negative results in between. If you throw N dice, the chance they all come up 6 is (1/6)^N. But if you throw 6N dice, on average N will come up 6. So, if the chance is 1/3 that you get a false positive excess heat, and 1/3 of cold fusion experiments show heat, then they could all be by chance, no matter how big N is. When you make insipid arguments based on unjustifiable assumptions, you should at least try to get the math right. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 7:23 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That is a form of Bayesian analysis, I think. No it's not. It's just ordinary probability theory, and it's not even right. That calculation gives the probability of getting N *consecutive* replications. The probability of rolling 6 on an ordinary die is 1/6, but it's easy to get N sixes (on average) just by throwing the die 6N times. It is the need for these sorts of arguments and Bayesian analysis that emphasizes the absence of a single experiment that will give an expected result.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: It is the need for these sorts of arguments and Bayesian analysis . . . There is no need for these sorts of arguments. They are the icing on the cake. The level of reproducibility in cold fusion is so high that in any other field of science or technology no one would question it. You would be considered crazy to question it. that emphasizes the absence of a single experiment that will give an expected result. There are many experiments that give the expected result. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
As a pragmatic skeptic, I'm looking for a cold fusion anomaly of any kind that has been described in exhaustive detail and which Believer's and Agnostics have discussed throughly and have been unable to discount -- I submit that the paper that Jed Rothwell cites in this thread is very sparse on details -- are there any other reports that describe these 7 runs, of which 2 seemed to give excess heat? The claims about Toyota's successes are indeed extraordinary evidence: They achieved high reproducibility, routinely triggering boil offs in 64 cells at a time. The work culminated with cells that ran for weeks at boiling temperature, at 40 to 100 W. See: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf [ 9 pages ] This project was terminated because of politics and disputes over money between Toyota and other companies, not because the research itself failed. -- Jed Rothwell Roulette, T., J. Roulette, and S. Pons. Results of ICARUS 9 Experiments Run at IMRA Europe. in Sixth International Conference on Cold Fusion, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy. 1996. Lake Toya, Hokkaido, Japan: New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. RESULTS OF ICARUS 9 EXPERIMENTS RUN AT IMRA EUROPE T. Roulette, J, Roulette, and S. Pons IMRA Europe, S.A., Centre Scientifique Sophia Antipolis, 06560 Valbonne , FRANCE INTRODUCTION We describe herein the construction, testing, calibration and use of a high power dissipation calorimeter suitable for the measurements of excess enthalpy generation in Pd / Pd alloy cathodes during the electrolysis of heavy water electrolytes at temperatures up to and including the boiling point of the electrolyte. With the present design, power dissipation up to about 400W is possible. Excess power levels of up to ~250% of the input power have been observed with these calorimeters in some experiments. Extensions of the design to include recombination catalysts on open and pressurized cells will be the subject of a future report. 2 of 7 runs, months long, gave excess heat. no details about how the Pd cathodes were prepared and changed. no references are given. how qualified are T. and J. Roulette? Did Joshua Cude ever comment on this report? within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 9:11 PM, James Bowery jabow...@gmail.com wrote: There are a lot of opinions that can dramatically lower one's evolutionary fitness if expressed. For example, when Moses came down with his tablets and was, shall we say, depressed by the reception -- he asked for the opinion of those around him and those who agreed with him were then ordered to kill everyone else. Civilization HO!!! On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:00 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: On Sat, 11 May 2013, Joshua Cude wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Or, just stick with the greater world of weird-but-nonCF subjects, where you see that the evidence is not yet decisive, and there's low chance of triggering a Believer vs. Debunker debate. This isn't a CF-only forum, though it tends to function as one! :) I push the crackpot-friendly aspect as a long-time experiment in Provisional Acceptance of crazy hypotheses. Currently in science, at least where weird topics are concerned, we instead operate with a philosophy of Provisional Disbelief, where we allow the evidence convince us to change our minds. But since disbelief is itself a strong bias, what happens if we test the opposite technique, and provisionally accept weird topics in order to study them?Just try it, and everyone attacks you: You actually BELIEVE in that crap?!! ANYONE WHO TAKES THAT STUFF SERIOUSLY IS A CRACKPOT. And of course the uncritical Believers want to welcome you into the fold. This above situation strongly suggests that certain topics have never been given a chance in the past. If each time someone tries to give them a chance, and is stopped by colleages, then we may actually have no idea whether those topics are truely Woo or not, since nobody is allowed to take them seriously enough to properly do the homework before making an informed decision. If we have to take on the (perceived) crackpot mantle in order to do proper homework, then that's exactly what's needed: declare oneself to be a True Believer Raving Loonie, then have at it. (Perhaps use a fake name here in order to protect one's professional rep.) http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.**htmlhttp://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Even so, I believe that many scientists have a habit of rejecting new ideas because they unknowingly maintain an illusory worldview which is based on concensus of colleagues, rather than upon evidence, and as a result they become irrational. They become very
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:00 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: On Sat, 11 May 2013, Joshua Cude wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. [...] I push the crackpot-friendly aspect as a long-time experiment in Provisional Acceptance of crazy hypotheses. Currently in science, at least where weird topics are concerned, we instead operate with a philosophy of Provisional Disbelief, where we allow the evidence convince us to change our minds. But that's not the case for cold fusion, where provisional acceptance was the order of the day in 1989. Where Pons got a standing ovation, and scientists everywhere went to their labs to get in on the revolution. Where even eventual uberskeptic Douglas Morrison wrote: … I feel this subject will become so important to society that we must consider the broader implications as well as the scientific ones […] the present big power companies will be running down their oil and coal power stations while they are building deuterium separation plants and new power plants based on cold fusion.…. That's called provisional acceptance. It didn't stand up though. (I know I said I'd slink away, but many of the responses here are about argument style and so on, so I think it's legitimate to reply to some of them. I still plan debunking replies to some of Rothwell's longer posts, but I'll put them elsewhere.)
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I would not call Cude articulate. How could you. You said yourself, you don't read what I write. It would be presumptuous to give an opinion about something you haven't read. As McKubre often says, I could do a better job as a cold fusion skeptic than any of the skeptics. It's a pity he (or you) can't do a better job as a cold fusion advocate. Because the mainstream does not believe cold fusion is real. So the skeptics are doing a pretty good job. If McKubre (or you) can do a better job as skeptics, then that just means the mainstream would be even more convinced. I'm not sure how this helps your case. I know of actual weaknesses in the experiments, whereas Cude makes up stuff, reiterates assertions that was proved wrong in 1990, and refuses to address substantive technical issues such as McKubre's Fig. 1. I've not made anything up, anything I've reiterated has not been proved wrong to anyone's satisfaction except a small band of true believers, and I addressed the loading correlation twice, but how would you know, since you don't actually read what I write. I do not think Cude is a credit to the hardcore skeptics. But then, I do not know anyone else who is. This is like expecting someone to be a credible spokesperson for the Flat Earth Society. You've got this backward. The flat earth society rejects the mainstream view, just like cold fusion true believers.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 9:45 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. Not at all. You can see many harsh critiques of cold fusion theory and experiments here in recent weeks, such as the debates between Beene and Storms. Not the same thing at all. Catholics argue about doctrine, but not about the existence of God. I don't particularly object to a the idea of a believer site, but Leitl is right here, that points of view critical of the reality of LENR are not welcome here (independent of the rules).
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote:
Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote:
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
As McKubre shows, the events have been repeated. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf
It shows that many groups claim excess heat, but he admits in the paper
that the experiments are not reproducible, in that some teams see nothing,
different results are seen in different labs, and inconsistent results are
seen in the same lab with similar samples.
They cannot be scaled up safely because they cannot be controlled.
Implausible excuse. There are ways to protect yourself against hundreds of
times more power or energy than observed in the biggest claims in cold
fusion. The plausible reason they don't scale up, is because when they do,
the effect doesn't get bigger.
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
That is correct. The cathodes are much smaller, for various reasons. The
ratio of heat to the mass of the cathode is much higher, however.
The main reason is because it gives confirmation bias a much better chance
when small errors can represent large *relative* effects.
Despite the cries here that nobody (I assume that means taxpayers)
will give money to allow lenr enthusiasts . . .
We are hoping that funding will be made available to professional
scientists, not enthusiasts. We would like to see a situation in which a
professional scientist with tenure can apply for a grant and not have
authorities call him up and threaten to shut down his lab or deport him.
Has this happened to Duncan, Hagelstein, Kim, Dash…? Because, if not, then
we have such a situation.
In other words, we favor traditional academic freedom, and the freedom to
do research the other scientists and the public thinks has no merit.
This freedom exists, but if the other scientists you're talking about
includes nearly all other scientists, it would be an insane system that
provides public funding for something that has no merit by nearly unanimous
opinion. There is competition for funding after all, and merit is the main
criterion.
to do the job they could
do if they had more money, I find it hard to believe that if there
was anything to the lenr effect, that some way of exploiting it
would not have been found since PF in 1989.
Why do you find it hard to believe this is difficult? Many other subject
are difficult, after all.
Because it's a small-scale experiment and the claim is a dramatically large
energy density. That's the claim to fame, after all.
Billions have been spent on plasma fusion with not significant progress
towards commercialization.
But the proof-of-principle was established at the beginning. And this is a
difficult, large-scale experiment -- its difficulty and scale being
precisely the reason cold fusion is so attractive, if only it worked.
There has not been much progress in HTSC which was discovered at about the
same time as cold fusion, even though HTSC got a lot more funding.
From the claim to acceptance of proof-of-principle required a tiny fraction
of what has been spent on cold fusion, which still does not have acceptance
of proof-of-principle.
In fact, the Japanese gave PF a lab and x million dollars and a
couple of years to repeat their original supposed lenr effect, and
they could not do it.
That is incorrect. The achieved high reproducibility, routinely triggering
boil offs in 64 cells at at time. The work culminated with cells that ran
for weeks at boiling temperature, at 40 to 100 W. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf
Nothing like routinely triggering boil-offs in 64 cells is reported in
that paper. That paper reports excess heat in 2 or 3 cells out of 7, and
it's a sloppily prepared conference proceeding with sentences that aren't
finished, missing section headings, errors in the correlation between
figures and the experiment number in the table, sketchy and incomplete
information, absence of raw data in favor of processed excess power and so
on.
It's a pathetic example of a scientific report, and it is the *only* thing
that came out of the tens of millions spent by Toyota. It's no wonder
Fleischmann's name is not on it; he was probably ashamed.
There's a reason people put more weight on refereed papers. It saves
duplication of effort in trying to penetrate poorly presented results. In
any case, Pons knew the importance of refereed publication, and so failure
to achieve that is significant.
The paper promises more papers on more careful experiments (taking account
of recombination and so on), but nothing more was ever published, even
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: The existing level of good research almost certainly proves than nuclear reactions can occur at low temperature. No. That's manifestly wrong. If it almost certainly proves it, then experts who examine it would say that. But 17 of 18 of the DOE panel said the evidence was *not* conclusive, and the mainstream continues to disbelieve it. Therefore it is *not* proven. To be in denial of that evidence by skeptics is no more than intellectual dishonesty. No. You're the one who's dishonest. By saying it's proven, when it's not. Proof by assertion is not proof at all. Look at Blacklight Power after running through maybe $80 million. Are they close to market? They're not even close to proving they have an effect. BTW the need for enriched isotopes explains why many visitors - notably Krivit, were not shown a working device. No one was shown a working device, where by working I mean a device that proved nuclear reactions were producing heat. The Rossi reactor may sometimes work with the natural ratio of nickel-62, which is under 4% - but it is hit-or-miss. No. It's a miss or miss more. The need for isotopic enrichment explains many things in the Rossi saga. No it doesn't. It's just a wild ass speculation to rationalize his failures.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: I wrote an entire book in order to place the evidence in one place and to show how it relates to the claims. In 2007. The world's view was not changed by it, and it's obvious why. The evidence as reported in your book makes cold fusion less plausible. If you do not know enough science to read and understand this collection, than you have to accept somebody's word about what it says. You are then in the position of believing either Cude or me or Jed, based on which of us sounds more plausible. He is in the position, as are funding agencies, of accepting the judgement of the vast majority of experts (like the DOE panel and most Nobel laureates who have weighed in) or a small ragtag band of true believers. Cude will win that argument because he says what you already believe and he says it very well. I think the point is that this would not be possible if there were credible evidence for cold fusion. No amount of polemic can make high Tc superconductivity look bogus, for example. Cude will simply say the work describes error and I will say it does not. How will you judge which of us to believe? It's not that the errors are necessarily obvious, especially from written reports, and can be exposed one at a time. It's that if the claims were true, the demonstrations would get better, as they invariably do with real phenomena. But instead they get worse, and less frequent, as is typical of pathological science. Some claims that Rothwell likes to repeat are so outrageously high (100 W with no input), that unequivocal demonstrations like the Wrights' flight should be easy to do, and yet when 60 minutes did a piece on cold fusion, they had nothing to show other than Duncan doing a calculation in a notebook. So how to judge which to believe? Look at what's come since. Does it make sense that in a decade or two since whatever evidence you talk about, there is so little (if any) progress? Until you can buy a CF device from Wall Mart, I suspect you will not know what to believe. That's the problem. Is there a single phenomenon that was not believed until a commercial product was released? This is just the silliest argument among many very silly arguments from the true believers.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I think it is rude for him not to address substantive points raised by others, such as McKubre Fig. 1. I did. Twice. I know it's easier for you to ignore what I write, and then attribute made-up arguments to me you think you can address, but if you're looking for an example of rudeness, that's it. Also, for example, he asked a legitimate question: In any case, my question was really why don't *all* intelligent people accept it. I made a serious effort to answer that question with an important example from history, of intelligent people who rejected what should have an irrefutable fact: that the U.S. would win an all-out war. Come on. You were just showing off. If you read the rest of my post, you'd realize I was making the point that war-time bravado and sociological decisions made in the heat of war are not the same as dispassionate decisions made by scientists over a period of many years. That you dig up that sort of example shows that there aren't any in the science arena.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I think many people have expressed highly skeptical view of BLP, Rossi and others here. I think most of this skepticism is justified! And yet you have said: Rossi has given out *far* more proof than any previous cold fusion researcher. […] That test is irrefutable by first principles. If skepticism of Rossi is justified, then according to your statement, skepticism of the whole field is justified.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Their method is assertion rather than trying to advance mutual understanding of the basic facts to be understood: there are no convincing experiments, there is zero credible evidence, every experimental result lies beneath the threshold of detection, and, by implication, there are no cold fusion researchers who can carry out a credible experiment. Here there has been little to no attempt to understand the history or the details of actual experiments. It's all over-broad generalization. You do seem to like arguing about arguing. But if you read the arguments, they do go beyond the simple assertion that the experiments are all wrong. I really think rehashing the details of all the experiments over 20 years would be a pointless exercise that would serve no purpose. This has been done -- with DOE panels and reviews of grants and journals etc -- and most scientists don't buy it. For casual observers, which I think includes most of the participants, it is possible to get a sense of the credibility of the evidence by making some general observations. So, for example, when Jones Benes argued that the tritium evidence was the bee's knees, he made no argument about specific results, but rather, based the argument on LANL's reputation. My reply was not mere assertion but a 5 point argument that dismantled his claim, and used LANL's reputation against cold fusion. In brief, it was that (1) the papers were all conference proceedings, (2) the same authors retracted neutron results, (3) Menlove jumped ship, (4) at the end the claimed levels were low, mostly near background, and (5) LANL abandoned the experiment in 1998 without a single respectable publication, and not a hint of the work on their web site. Similar arguments can be made about the tritium results in general. In particular, why is no one doing them anymore, considering nothing interesting about them has been settled.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:30 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: To be concrete, I think the issue is primarily one about attention to detail and to questions of burden of evidence. It's fine to be skeptical of the tritium evidence, for example. But if one is going to argue against it, one is going to have a lot of work to do. One will have to show how each tritium result in each experiment was wrong or questionable, in specific detail; i.e., the burden of evidence (on this list, at any rate) will be on the person arguing against tritium having been found in some LENR experiments. Again, I think that's nonsense. It's not possible to find errors in experiments, just by reading reports, especially when they are incomplete conference proceedings, as is the case for most of the tritium results. It would be a lot of guessing and would not advance the discussion. But the absence of glaring errors does not make a claim credible. What's needed is credible replications and some kind of visible progress. In the case of the tritium results, they vary by *ten* orders of magnitude, and no two labs get the same results or even consistent results themselves. I already argued why the LANL results are not persuasive. Likewise, BARC claimed high tritium results within weeks of the 1989 press conference using Pd-D, and then 2 years later they were claiming levels 5 orders of magnitude lower using H-Ni. What happened to Pd? Then you have Bockris's results were also very high, but were challenged as fraudulent. He was cleared in a hearing, but there was a *hearing*, rather than having the question settled in the lab. Can you imagine if someone had accused Mueller and Bednorz of fraud when they claimed high temperature superconductivity? They would have simply invited the accuser, or adjudicator, or his charge, to the lab, and they would have said, OK, Yup, it works. Or they could have called up *anyone* else in the field on the planet, and they could have said: Yup, it works, they're OK. Tritium results are supposed to be so obvious, but they had to have a hearing to determine if someone contaminated the experiment. You also have McKubre in 1988 confidently stating that tritium is not observed in electrolysis experiments. As with heat (or neutrons), the situation is no clearer with tritium now than it was 20 years ago. The levels have largely decreased over time, and in the last decade, there has been very little activity on the tritium front, which again, fits pathological science, and puts those early results -- some already under suspicion -- in serious doubt. To my mind, if they can't resolve the tritium question in some kind of definitive and quantitative way, there is no hope for heat. It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the effect that there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are not contamination, etc. and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think it's wrong. See above. That's not what I've done. I've said that if there were reliable evidence, the tritium saga would have played out differently, and not just slowly disappeared from the scene.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? Everyone will have a different answer. A knowledgeable person will want to look at the papers, and evaluate the skills of the researchers, the choice of instruments, the signal to noise ratios and so on. For an experimental finding as surprising as cold fusion, I think most people will demand 5 or 10 quality replications from professional labs. What constitutes quality is partly matter of opinion. Exactly. And the prevailing opinion is that there are *no* quality replications. When PF claim 140 W output with 40 W input with one type of calorimetry, and McKubre gets 1 W out with 10 W input, that's not a quality replication. I would say that by 1990 there were so many replications of heat and tritium that any continued doubts were irrational. Right, so Gell-Mann, Lederman, Glashow, Huizenga, Koonin, Lewis, etc etc can all be dismissed with a simple statement from a computer scientist as being irrational. A Bayesian analysis sheds some light on this. No. It really doesn't. A big pile of marginal results makes it look more pathological, not less.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I wrote: A brand new type of measurement, or one made with an experimental new type of instrument, may be open to question. That was the situation with polywater. That is why it took a couple of years to determine it was caused by contamination. The results were very close the limits of sensitivity, unlike cold fusion. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I would say a proper debunking of polywater requires more than detecting the presence of contaminants. The concentrations of the contaminants has to be large enough to bring about the property changes. Were the concentrations measured? If the concentrations are too small then polywater could still be real from the standpoint of homeopathy. Harry On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: I wrote: A brand new type of measurement, or one made with an experimental new type of instrument, may be open to question. That was the situation with polywater. That is why it took a couple of years to determine it was caused by contamination. The results were very close the limits of sensitivity, unlike cold fusion. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
It is a judgement call. ***Then, since this is Bill Beaty's forum, it is up to him to come up with the set of facts that we consider to be the watershed between debunkers and small-s skeptics. I have posted what I consider to be the base set and will proceed from it until Bill weighs in. Others can characterize my approach as churlish all they want, but I don't see them putting in a base set of facts. Sneering against vorts IS against the rules, but being 'churlish' when someone blithely walks over a base set of facts is not against the rules. How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? Somewhere between 10 replications and 180, it becomes irrational to deny the effect is real. Is that number 15? 20? 50? ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That's the probability of it being an artifact, and it will be far less than the mathematically designed probability of 10^-50 regardless of what number of replications are settled upon.Let's say it's 30 labs and they've replicated it 10 times per lab (It's highly doubtful that 30 labs would replicate it only once each lab). Then it's (1/3)^300. Joshua Cude thought it was better than 5/6 chance of false-positive, which has never happened in the history of science and would be a great phenomenon to investigate in and of itself. Also, he never gives a figure of how many replications have made it under the wire, because then he would have to admit that this is not really a pathological science. So all we really need is for Bill to weigh in on how many replications are considered obvious. And what the chances of generating false-positives are. From my readings, the number of true false positives appears to be far less than 1/100. Perhaps Ed can shed some light on this. On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small 's' skeptic. It is a judgement call. Science is objective, yet at the finest level of detail, it is a judgement call. It has a strange duality. The key question has always been: How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? Everyone will have a different answer. A knowledgeable person will want to look at the papers, and evaluate the skills of the researchers, the choice of instruments, the signal to noise ratios and so on. For an experimental finding as surprising as cold fusion, I think most people will demand 5 or 10 quality replications from professional labs. What constitutes quality is partly matter of opinion. Somewhere between 10 replications and 180, it becomes irrational to deny the effect is real. Is that number 15? 20? 50? Only you can decide, but I would say that by 1990 there were so many replications of heat and tritium that any continued doubts were irrational. A Bayesian analysis sheds some light on this. (See Johnson and Melich). Still, deciding exactly where you draw the line becomes a little like Mandelbrot's question: how long is the coast of England? The closer you look, the fuzzier it becomes. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That is a form of Bayesian analysis, I think. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That is a form of Bayesian analysis, I think. No it's not. It's just ordinary probability theory, and it's not even right. That calculation gives the probability of getting N *consecutive* replications. The probability of rolling 6 on an ordinary die is 1/6, but it's easy to get N sixes (on average) just by throwing the die 6N times. It is the need for these sorts of arguments and Bayesian analysis that emphasizes the absence of a single experiment that will give an expected result.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
What it represents is the probability that ALL of the replications were the result of error. It is exceedingly small. Far below the mathematical definition of impossible, which is 10^-50. That is what Joshua Cude thinks is the case. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 7:23 PM, Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: ***We can proceed with the same probability math I used upthread. If one considers it to be 1/3 chance of generating a false-positive excess heat event, then you take that 1/3 to the power of how many replications are on record. That is a form of Bayesian analysis, I think. No it's not. It's just ordinary probability theory, and it's not even right. That calculation gives the probability of getting N *consecutive* replications. The probability of rolling 6 on an ordinary die is 1/6, but it's easy to get N sixes (on average) just by throwing the die 6N times. It is the need for these sorts of arguments and Bayesian analysis that emphasizes the absence of a single experiment that will give an expected result.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sat, 11 May 2013 17:53:29 -0500 Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Otherwise, adios. It's been a slice. It is a pity that J Cude is leaving. While I enjoy a True Believer site as much as anyone, after a while it is like eating nothing but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote: While I enjoy a True Believer site as much as anyone, after a while it is like eating nothing but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics. If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I wrote: but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics. If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? I would not call Cude articulate. As McKubre often says, I could do a better job as a cold fusion skeptic than any of the skeptics. I know of actual weaknesses in the experiments, whereas Cude makes up stuff, reiterates assertions that was proved wrong in 1990, and refuses to address substantive technical issues such as McKubre's Fig. 1. Where are the meat and potatoes? I do not think Cude is a credit to the hardcore skeptics. But then, I do not know anyone else who is. This is like expecting someone to be a credible spokesperson for the Flat Earth Society. Vorl Bek should take a crack at justifying this point of view if he thinks it has any merit. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I think we need to consider two types of skeptics. If a person does not even believe the validity of the subject being discussed, what can that skeptic contribute. If CF is not real, what is the point of discussing why or how it works? The second kind of skeptics works by considering the basic idea being true, but have questions about the details. Cude is not interested in the details of CF because none of the details are correct. I suggest this kind of skeptic is a waste of time once the basic idea is accepted. Ed Storms On May 12, 2013, at 6:07 AM, Vorl Bek wrote: On Sat, 11 May 2013 17:53:29 -0500 Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Otherwise, adios. It's been a slice. It is a pity that J Cude is leaving. While I enjoy a True Believer site as much as anyone, after a while it is like eating nothing but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Believers without Skeptics are blandly blind. Skeptics without Believers are blindly sterile. The forever fecund spontaneous creativity of the present moment is not bound in the least by any binding limits of spaces, times, causalities, separate identities, perceptions, concepts, emotions, logics, mathematics... the son of science has no bed where he can lay his head... the eternal jam session best includes all volunteer voices... how boring to exclude the incisive imperfect Joshua Cude from our children's playground... let the idiot who has never drooled throw the first stone... within the fellowship of service, Rich On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: I wrote: but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics. If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? I would not call Cude articulate. As McKubre often says, I could do a better job as a cold fusion skeptic than any of the skeptics. I know of actual weaknesses in the experiments, whereas Cude makes up stuff, reiterates assertions that was proved wrong in 1990, and refuses to address substantive technical issues such as McKubre's Fig. 1. Where are the meat and potatoes? I do not think Cude is a credit to the hardcore skeptics. But then, I do not know anyone else who is. This is like expecting someone to be a credible spokesperson for the Flat Earth Society. Vorl Bek should take a crack at justifying this point of view if he thinks it has any merit. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 09:12:56AM -0400, Jed Rothwell wrote: Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote: While I enjoy a True Believer site as much as anyone, after a while it is like eating nothing but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics. If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. It seems that anything (to put it politely) is on-topic here but a critical view on LENR. That pushes the list into non-worthwhile territory for me as well.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, 12 May 2013 09:12:56 -0400
Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote:
If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you
write about it?
I don't know very much about this business and I can not debate it,
but I consider myself to be like a juror listening to the
testimony of experts: I may not understand all of what they say,
but I can get a pretty good idea of which one's testimony makes
the most sense.
Cude's demeanor was consistently polite; the several people he
was up against were rather less polite in many instances, and one
of them was downright churlish.
None of them seemed to me to be as convincing as Cude was.
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
or
laboratory curiosities: 3.001 watts out for 3 watts in; or larger
ratios, but can't be achieved regularly, and can not be scaled up;
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
Despite the cries here that nobody (I assume that means taxpayers)
will give money to allow lenr enthusiasts to do the job they could
do if they had more money, I find it hard to believe that if there
was anything to the lenr effect, that some way of exploiting it
would not have been found since PF in 1989.
In fact, the Japanese gave PF a lab and x million dollars and a
couple of years to repeat their original supposed lenr effect, and
they could not do it.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. Not at all. You can see many harsh critiques of cold fusion theory and experiments here in recent weeks, such as the debates between Beene and Storms. Rule 2 (http://www.amasci.com/weird/wvort.html#rules) states: Ridicule, derision, scoffing, and ad-hominem is banned. Debunking or Pathological Skepticism is banned . . . The tone here should be one of legitimate disagreement and respectful debate. This is the standard in an academic debate at a university, a conference, or in most mainstream journals. This is how adults are supposed to discuss an academic subject. It seems that anything (to put it politely) is on-topic here but a critical view on LENR. I think you exaggerate, and I think you are overlooking the many vigorous debates here and harsh criticism of people such as Rossi. That pushes the list into non-worthwhile territory for me as well. That is a shame. Perhaps you should test this. Try offering what you a consider a valid critique, couched in a proper academic style. You will see if other people think you are breaking the rules. You will see if you can master academese. It calls for a degree of hypocritical, or false, politeness. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I second the summary observations by Vorl Bek:
Cude's demeanor was consistently polite; the several people he
was up against were rather less polite in many instances, and one
of them was downright churlish.
None of them seemed to me to be as convincing as Cude was.
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
or
laboratory curiosities: 3.001 watts out for 3 watts in; or larger
ratios, but can't be achieved regularly, and can not be scaled up;
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
within the fellowship of service, Rich
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote:
On Sun, 12 May 2013 09:12:56 -0400
Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote:
If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you
write about it?
I don't know very much about this business and I can not debate it,
but I consider myself to be like a juror listening to the
testimony of experts: I may not understand all of what they say,
but I can get a pretty good idea of which one's testimony makes
the most sense.
Cude's demeanor was consistently polite; the several people he
was up against were rather less polite in many instances, and one
of them was downright churlish.
None of them seemed to me to be as convincing as Cude was.
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
or
laboratory curiosities: 3.001 watts out for 3 watts in; or larger
ratios, but can't be achieved regularly, and can not be scaled up;
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
Despite the cries here that nobody (I assume that means taxpayers)
will give money to allow lenr enthusiasts to do the job they could
do if they had more money, I find it hard to believe that if there
was anything to the lenr effect, that some way of exploiting it
would not have been found since PF in 1989.
In fact, the Japanese gave PF a lab and x million dollars and a
couple of years to repeat their original supposed lenr effect, and
they could not do it.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote:
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
As McKubre shows, the events have been repeated. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf
The explosions are extremely rare. I have photos of them at LENR-CANR.org
mainly to warn off amateurs, and to keep people from doing these
experiments in poorly equipped, unsafe labs, not because I think the
explosions prove anything about the effect that the published data does not
prove.
laboratory curiosities: 3.001 watts out for 3 watts in; or larger
ratios, but can't be achieved regularly, and can not be scaled up;
They cannot be scaled up safely because they cannot be controlled.
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
That is correct. The cathodes are much smaller, for various reasons. The
ratio of heat to the mass of the cathode is much higher, however.
Despite the cries here that nobody (I assume that means taxpayers)
will give money to allow lenr enthusiasts . . .
We are hoping that funding will be made available to professional
scientists, not enthusiasts. We would like to see a situation in which a
professional scientist with tenure can apply for a grant and not have
authorities call him up and threaten to shut down his lab or deport him. In
other words, we favor traditional academic freedom, and the freedom to do
research the other scientists and the public thinks has no merit.
to do the job they could
do if they had more money, I find it hard to believe that if there
was anything to the lenr effect, that some way of exploiting it
would not have been found since PF in 1989.
Why do you find it hard to believe this is difficult? Many other subject
are difficult, after all. Billions have been spent on plasma fusion with
not significant progress towards commercialization. There has not been much
progress in HTSC which was discovered at about the same time as cold
fusion, even though HTSC got a lot more funding. Hundreds of billions have
been spent on cancer research since the 1960s but unfortunately the death
rate has hardly changed at all for many types of cancer.
In fact, the Japanese gave PF a lab and x million dollars and a
couple of years to repeat their original supposed lenr effect, and
they could not do it.
That is incorrect. The achieved high reproducibility, routinely triggering
boil offs in 64 cells at at time. The work culminated with cells that ran
for weeks at boiling temperature, at 40 to 100 W. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf
This project was terminated because of politics and disputes over money
between Toyota and other companies, not because the research itself failed.
The NHE project was terminated because it made little progress. Although as
Miles reported, he did achieve significant excess heat at their lab. The
lab director and others refused to look, and they reported that he did not
produce heat. This was also politically motivated, obviously.
- Jed
RE: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
There is plenty of room to be skeptical that LENR will ever get to market. Cude was correct on that point. I think that airing alternative viewpoints on the subject of what it takes for commercialization can be quite productive for the future of the field. But of course, even discussing that is not the mission of the pathological skeptics. Many of us really resent the efforts of those who want to impugn many years of quality research at Universities, SRI, National Labs and so on - by top researchers. Sure, there is some research which is substandard, but that is not the point. The existing level of good research almost certainly proves than nuclear reactions can occur at low temperature. To be in denial of that evidence by skeptics is no more than intellectual dishonesty. This still does not prove that the World will ever benefit from this technology, but that is a completely separate subject for showing that it is real on a laboratory scale. That LENR is a physical reality at some scale is a given - but even so, that situation is far removed from the ability to take the underlying principle to market. Look at Blacklight Power after running through maybe $80 million. Are they close to market? A PoC device from BLP was due out in February and it is not here. If Rossi's process requires enrichment in Ni-62, as it almost certainly now seems to be the case - then it may never make it to a mass market. That explains why he is pursuing the military or NASA angle - where cost is not the prime concern. BTW the need for enriched isotopes explains why many visitors - notably Krivit, were not shown a working device. The Rossi reactor may sometimes work with the natural ratio of nickel-62, which is under 4% - but it is hit-or-miss. It was a miss with Krivit and a few others. Rossi gambled and lost on a few instances. When Rossi uses an enriched fuel - say, it is enriched by a factor of 10 times (above natural Ni) then robust gain may be assured, but does he want to spend a large sum for every demonstration? Probably not, so he risked it in a few cases - and had notable flops. He probably pays a lot less than the going rate for the enriched isotope, but even so it is probably too steep for easy commercialization. As for Rossi having his own process to enrich - that is possible, but doubtful - and made even more doubtful by not being included in his patent application. The need for isotopic enrichment explains many things in the Rossi saga. From: Jed Rothwell I wrote: but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics. If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? I would not call Cude articulate. As McKubre often says, I could do a better job as a cold fusion skeptic than any of the skeptics. I know of actual weaknesses in the experiments, whereas Cude makes up stuff, reiterates assertions that was proved wrong in 1990, and refuses to address substantive technical issues such as McKubre's Fig. 1. Where are the meat and potatoes? I do not think Cude is a credit to the hardcore skeptics. But then, I do not know anyone else who is. This is like expecting someone to be a credible spokesperson for the Flat Earth Society. Vorl Bek should take a crack at justifying this point of view if he thinks it has any merit. - Jed attachment: winmail.dat
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Vorl, it is impossible to decide if CF is real based on the kind of
reasoning you give below or by listening to a discussion between Cude
and anyone else. The level of the discussion is so superficial to be
useless. I wrote an entire book in order to place the evidence in one
place and to show how it relates to the claims. I have over 2000
papers in my collection that relate directly to the subject. If you do
not know enough science to read and understand this collection, than
you have to accept somebody's word about what it says. You are then in
the position of believing either Cude or me or Jed, based on which of
us sounds more plausible. Cude will win that argument because he says
what you already believe and he says it very well.
If I had the time, I could refute everything Cude says using cited
work. But if you do not have the ability to read and understand this
work, such an effort would be useless. Cude will simply say the work
describes error and I will say it does not. How will you judge which
of us to believe? Until you can buy a CF device from Wall Mart, I
suspect you will not know what to believe. I would rather spend my
time trying to make CF work better, and perhaps get a product to Wall
Mart sooner, than spend my time in this kind of discussion. I hope you
can understand my problem.
Ed Storms
On May 12, 2013, at 8:42 AM, Vorl Bek wrote:
On Sun, 12 May 2013 09:12:56 -0400
Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote:
If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't
you
write about it?
I don't know very much about this business and I can not debate it,
but I consider myself to be like a juror listening to the
testimony of experts: I may not understand all of what they say,
but I can get a pretty good idea of which one's testimony makes
the most sense.
Cude's demeanor was consistently polite; the several people he
was up against were rather less polite in many instances, and one
of them was downright churlish.
None of them seemed to me to be as convincing as Cude was.
From reading the exchanges here and on other forums, I have the
impression (my 'verdict') that the evidence for lenr is
either:
anecdotal ('all the water boiled out of the bucket!';'there
was a terrific explosion!' - that sort of report), but that the
events can not be repeated;
or
laboratory curiosities: 3.001 watts out for 3 watts in; or larger
ratios, but can't be achieved regularly, and can not be scaled up;
in fact, according to Cude, claims have been scaled down over
the years.
Despite the cries here that nobody (I assume that means taxpayers)
will give money to allow lenr enthusiasts to do the job they could
do if they had more money, I find it hard to believe that if there
was anything to the lenr effect, that some way of exploiting it
would not have been found since PF in 1989.
In fact, the Japanese gave PF a lab and x million dollars and a
couple of years to repeat their original supposed lenr effect, and
they could not do it.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Vorl Bek vorl@antichef.com wrote: Cude's demeanor was consistently polite . . . I disagree. I think it is rude for him not to address substantive points raised by others, such as McKubre Fig. 1. Also, for example, he asked a legitimate question: In any case, my question was really why don't *all* intelligent people accept it. I made a serious effort to answer that question with an important example from history, of intelligent people who rejected what should have an irrefutable fact: that the U.S. would win an all-out war. This fact should have been self-evident to every intelligent, educated person in Japan. Why didn't *all* intelligent Japanese people believe this?!? . . . there is no doubt that in 1941 intelligent people at all levels of society enthusiastically supported the war. Why? Because they were sure they would win. It never crossed their minds they might lose. Cude was the one who raised this point. When I addressed it, he was rude, dismissive and obtuse: I would like to explore this dreadful history a little more, because I know a lot about it. Certainly not because it has any relevance. What you're saying is that two countries are at war, one claims they will crush the other, and the other doesn't believe it, and therefore cold fusion is real. . . . This is not how you win a debate or make friends. I do not care whether he was polite or not. Rudeness does not bother me. But I know rude when I see it, and he is rude. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: There is plenty of room to be skeptical that LENR will ever get to market. Cude was correct on that point. I think that airing alternative viewpoints on the subject of what it takes for commercialization can be quite productive for the future of the field. Exactly right. Plus there are many technical claims that are questionable or not repeated yet. Host metal transmutation is not as well established as, say, tritium. Iwamura has done good work and Toyota replicated him, but it is still long way from the tritium results. Many of us really resent the efforts of those who want to impugn many years of quality research at Universities, SRI, National Labs and so on - by top researchers. Sure, there is some research which is substandard, but that is not the point. The existing level of good research almost certainly proves than nuclear reactions can occur at low temperature. Yup, I resent that! To be in denial of that evidence by skeptics is no more than intellectual dishonesty. Maybe it is with some people. But I think the debate is reasonably fair. Most supporters and skeptics who are wrong (wrong in my opinion) are making honest mistakes, or they are ignorant, or they interpret the data wrong. Cude strikes me as honest in his opinions. I think he sincerely believes that McKubre Fig. 1 has no significance, because most cells do not achieve the high loading shown there. That is a mistake, not dishonest. He does not understand the point of this graph. Perhaps he should make more of an effort to understand, but we can't fault people for misunderstanding. This still does not prove that the World will ever benefit from this technology, but that is a completely separate subject for showing that it is real on a laboratory scale. Yes, separate. Except that some results, such as that the final results from Toyota, do prove that commercial level power density, i/o ratios, and temperatures on a small scale are possible. Whether they can be sustained or scaled up is an open question. You would never get those temperatures or ratios from muon catalyzed fusion. Plasma fusion has never achieved fully ignited heat after death. That LENR is a physical reality at some scale is a given - but even so, that situation is far removed from the ability to take the underlying principle to market. It sure is. Look at Blacklight Power after running through maybe $80 million. Are they close to market? No idea, and I would love to know. A PoC device from BLP was due out in February and it is not here. Who knows what to make of that. Sigh. . . . I think many people have expressed highly skeptical view of BLP, Rossi and others here. I think most of this skepticism is justified! - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: If you think there is merit to a skeptical point of view, why don't you write about it? Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. It seems that anything (to put it politely) is on-topic here but a critical view on LENR. That pushes the list into non-worthwhile territory for me as well. I can't speak for Bill, and it's his forum. But I do not think the intention is to gather a bunch of people who already agree with one another. It seems to me that the goal is to have a learning process, where people listen to one another and try to achieve mutual understanding, at least to some degree, on the basic facts being debated. Polemical skeptics disrupt such a learning process. Their method is assertion rather than trying to advance mutual understanding of the basic facts to be understood: there are no convincing experiments, there is zero credible evidence, every experimental result lies beneath the threshold of detection, and, by implication, there are no cold fusion researchers who can carry out a credible experiment. Here there has been little to no attempt to understand the history or the details of actual experiments. It's all over-broad generalization. To agree or disagree with it, you have to set aside a great deal of what you've already gone over and start from the very beginning. (Eg.: you're mistaken, as there are clearly competent people among the cold fusion scientists, and so-and-so seems to be seeing something above the threshold of background. The debater is urged to go read a single paper by the author on the topic.) Such over-broad generalizations are the stuff for other forums such as moletrap. You can't build anything upon it other than a kind of canonical skeptical pseudo-religious discourse. Learning about the actual interesting details to discussed and disputed is disrupted. The only statements that are examined in detail are too basic to be interesting. I think a critical view on LENR is fine, but what is to be avoided is a debunking mode which employs such generalizations. A LENR skeptic (with the small s) is very welcome by me (this is obviously not my list). But address specific details; do not rely on ad hominem or over-broad generalizations. Joshua Cude has been doing exactly those things. It's a pity, too, because he's obviously smart. I hope smart skeptics here do not draw the wrong lessons from the current exchange, because it's easy to miss the point at issue -- that what is wanted is a commitment to mutual understanding of the basic facts rather than polemical assertion of statements that only a coterie of hardcore skeptics can get on board with. It's not all that complex, in the final analysis. People just need to respect one another's intelligence. Eric
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
The standard skepticism that any scientist should have, wishing to explore, to look at the evidence, to experiment and refine, is , from what I've seen, welcome here. What is not is blindly saying, THis cannot be true, and then, THEN, after deciding something is false, going about poking every hole in it possible. Should the same arguements be made from a point of, Did you consider this, did you take that into account, how can we refine this and make it a BETTER model, then there wouldnt be an issue, I believe. On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Edmund Storms stor...@ix.netcom.comwrote: I think we need to consider two types of skeptics. If a person does not even believe the validity of the subject being discussed, what can that skeptic contribute. If CF is not real, what is the point of discussing why or how it works? The second kind of skeptics works by considering the basic idea being true, but have questions about the details. Cude is not interested in the details of CF because none of the details are correct. I suggest this kind of skeptic is a waste of time once the basic idea is accepted. Ed Storms On May 12, 2013, at 6:07 AM, Vorl Bek wrote: On Sat, 11 May 2013 17:53:29 -0500 Joshua Cude joshua.c...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Otherwise, adios. It's been a slice. It is a pity that J Cude is leaving. While I enjoy a True Believer site as much as anyone, after a while it is like eating nothing but dessert - you need some meat and potatoes in the form of articulate skeptics.
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I think many people have expressed highly skeptical view of BLP, Rossi and others here. I think most of this skepticism is justified! -- Jed Rothwell So, here's two cases where Joshua Cude and Jed Rothwell concur about evidence. The claims about Toyota's successes are indeed extraordinary evidence: They achieved high reproducibility, routinely triggering boil offs in 64 cells at a time. The work culminated with cells that ran for weeks at boiling temperature, at 40 to 100 W. See: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf [ 9 pages ] This project was terminated because of politics and disputes over money between Toyota and other companies, not because the research itself failed. -- Jed Rothwell Roulette, T., J. Roulette, and S. Pons. Results of ICARUS 9 Experiments Run at IMRA Europe. in Sixth International Conference on Cold Fusion, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy. 1996. Lake Toya, Hokkaido, Japan: New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. RESULTS OF ICARUS 9 EXPERIMENTS RUN AT IMRA EUROPE T. Roulette, J, Roulette, and S. Pons IMRA Europe, S.A., Centre Scientifique Sophia Antipolis, 06560 Valbonne , FRANCE INTRODUCTION We describe herein the construction, testing, calibration and use of a high power dissipation calorimeter suitable for the measurements of excess enthalpy generation in Pd / Pd alloy cathodes during the electrolysis of heavy water electrolytes at temperatures up to and including the boiling point of the electrolyte. With the present design, power dissipation up to about 400W is possible. Excess power levels of up to ~250% of the input power have been observed with these calorimeters in some experiments. Extensions of the design to include recombination catalysts on open and pressurized cells will be the subject of a future report. 2 of 7 runs, months long, gave excess heat. no details about how the Pd cathodes were prepared and changed. no references are given. how qualified are T. and J. Roulette? Joshua Cude, would you comment on this on newvortex? within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 8:47 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: There is plenty of room to be skeptical that LENR will ever get to market. Cude was correct on that point. I think that airing alternative viewpoints on the subject of what it takes for commercialization can be quite productive for the future of the field. Exactly right. Plus there are many technical claims that are questionable or not repeated yet. Host metal transmutation is not as well established as, say, tritium. Iwamura has done good work and Toyota replicated him, but it is still long way from the tritium results. Many of us really resent the efforts of those who want to impugn many years of quality research at Universities, SRI, National Labs and so on - by top researchers. Sure, there is some research which is substandard, but that is not the point. The existing level of good research almost certainly proves than nuclear reactions can occur at low temperature. Yup, I resent that! To be in denial of that evidence by skeptics is no more than intellectual dishonesty. Maybe it is with some people. But I think the debate is reasonably fair. Most supporters and skeptics who are wrong (wrong in my opinion) are making honest mistakes, or they are ignorant, or they interpret the data wrong. Cude strikes me as honest in his opinions. I think he sincerely believes that McKubre Fig. 1 has no significance, because most cells do not achieve the high loading shown there. That is a mistake, not dishonest. He does not understand the point of this graph. Perhaps he should make more of an effort to understand, but we can't fault people for misunderstanding. This still does not prove that the World will ever benefit from this technology, but that is a completely separate subject for showing that it is real on a laboratory scale. Yes, separate. Except that some results, such as that the final results from Toyota, do prove that commercial level power density, i/o ratios, and temperatures on a small scale are possible. Whether they can be sustained or scaled up is an open question. You would never get those temperatures or ratios from muon catalyzed fusion. Plasma fusion has never achieved fully ignited heat after death. That LENR is a physical reality at some scale is a given - but even so, that situation is far removed from the ability to take the underlying principle to market. It sure is. Look at Blacklight Power after running through maybe $80 million. Are they close to market? No idea, and I would love to know. A PoC device from BLP was due out in February and it is not here. Who knows what to make of that. Sigh. . . . I think many people have expressed highly skeptical view of BLP, Rossi and others here. I think
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:39 AM, leaking pen itsat...@gmail.com wrote: The standard skepticism that any scientist should have, wishing to explore, to look at the evidence, to experiment and refine, is , from what I've seen, welcome here. What is not is blindly saying, THis cannot be true, and then, THEN, after deciding something is false, going about poking every hole in it possible. Should the same arguements be made from a point of, Did you consider this, did you take that into account, how can we refine this and make it a BETTER model, then there wouldnt be an issue, I believe. Right. To be concrete, I think the issue is primarily one about attention to detail and to questions of burden of evidence. It's fine to be skeptical of the tritium evidence, for example. But if one is going to argue against it, one is going to have a lot of work to do. One will have to show how each tritium result in each experiment was wrong or questionable, in specific detail; i.e., the burden of evidence (on this list, at any rate) will be on the person arguing against tritium having been found in some LENR experiments. We assume here that in general LENR researchers are competent overall. One should just accept this as a ground rule. This is not at all to say that all of the tritium findings have been reliable or that all or even perhaps many of the experiments were done well. It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the effect that there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are not contamination, etc. and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think it's wrong. It's fine if the burden of evidence elsewhere would not permit one to refer to the LENR tritium findings. The point is that the burden of evidence *here* allows one to do so, and in order to modify or unseat the general conclusion that tritium has been found in some LENR experiments, one is going to have to do quite a bit of work in connection with the specific details of specific experiments. The burden of evidence is reversed here, and there is no free lunch for someone who wishes to argue against tritium. Eric
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
I'd venture to make a suggestion, or request. Not to disparage or discourage all that goes on here, but to encourage also maybe a slight veer to the left (right?). Admittedly, I have not read anywhere near all the papers available (and don't understand most of them very well anyway) but It seems like it could be fruitful to initiate a new 'Symposium' that the experts could occasionally contribute a piece to . I'd like to hear more about the nature of the NAE and also what kinds of new (and old) methods and knowledge from a plethora of aspects could profitably be conjectured about. e.g. what do we really know about Celani's 'prepared' wire, or Parchamanazad's Pd lattices, Piantelli;s etc. Especially interesting, I think, would be to bring in a raft of findings from the recent literature on Material Science, especially nano, and metallurgy, nanophotonics, 'manufactured' atom structures, and the like. (Hopefully soon we might also be able to even tear into one of Rossi's cats and reverse engineer the nano and/or microparticles), On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:39 AM, leaking pen itsat...@gmail.com wrote: The standard skepticism that any scientist should have, wishing to explore, to look at the evidence, to experiment and refine, is , from what I've seen, welcome here. What is not is blindly saying, THis cannot be true, and then, THEN, after deciding something is false, going about poking every hole in it possible. Should the same arguements be made from a point of, Did you consider this, did you take that into account, how can we refine this and make it a BETTER model, then there wouldnt be an issue, I believe. Right. To be concrete, I think the issue is primarily one about attention to detail and to questions of burden of evidence. It's fine to be skeptical of the tritium evidence, for example. But if one is going to argue against it, one is going to have a lot of work to do. One will have to show how each tritium result in each experiment was wrong or questionable, in specific detail; i.e., the burden of evidence (on this list, at any rate) will be on the person arguing against tritium having been found in some LENR experiments. We assume here that in general LENR researchers are competent overall. One should just accept this as a ground rule. This is not at all to say that all of the tritium findings have been reliable or that all or even perhaps many of the experiments were done well. It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the effect that there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are not contamination, etc. and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think it's wrong. It's fine if the burden of evidence elsewhere would not permit one to refer to the LENR tritium findings. The point is that the burden of evidence *here* allows one to do so, and in order to modify or unseat the general conclusion that tritium has been found in some LENR experiments, one is going to have to do quite a bit of work in connection with the specific details of specific experiments. The burden of evidence is reversed here, and there is no free lunch for someone who wishes to argue against tritium. Eric
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: We assume here that in general LENR researchers are competent overall. One should just accept this as a ground rule. . . . Yes. They are professionals, after all. Before they did cold fusion no one thought they were not experts. That is not to say that every single professional is competent, but statistically most of them are, and when you get a group this large it is certain that several will be. It's simply that one can't get away with a facile statement to the effect that there is no reliable evidence that the tritium findings are not contamination, etc. and expect it to advance anyone's understanding. It's just a dogmatic assertion, since there are specific reasons to think it's wrong. Exactly. It's fine if the burden of evidence elsewhere would not permit one to refer to the LENR tritium findings. The point is that the burden of evidence *here* allows one to do so . . . Actually, in a valid forum for science, this should always be the rule. It is outlandish to claim that there might a problem with standard instruments and methods when used by a large group of experts. That is true whether you are talking about measuring tritium, or heat, rainfall, blood pressure or any other physical property. A person who says that such widespread, long established techniques are not reliable has a heavy burden of proof. To start with, you have to point out specific errors made by specific people. No skeptic has done this. Morrison and a few others tried, but they failed. A brand new type of measurement, or one made with an experimental new type of instrument, may be open to question. Measurements by amateurs with homemade instruments are always open to question! - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
ken deboer barlaz...@gmail.com wrote: Admittedly, I have not read anywhere near all the papers available (and don't understand most of them very well anyway) but It seems like it could be fruitful to initiate a new 'Symposium' that the experts could occasionally contribute a piece to . That is what ICCF conferences are for. Read the proceedings. Researchers do not have time to write more than that. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small 's' skeptic. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: By 'we' I mean Vortex minus debunkers. Small 's' skeptics are welcome, but debunkers are not. We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small 's' skeptic. Vortex rules: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note that small-s skepticism of the openminded sort is perfectly acceptable on Vortex-L. We crackpots don't want to be *completely* self-deluding. :) The ban here is aimed at Debunkers; at certain disbeleif and its self-superior and archly hostile results, and at the sort of Skeptic who angrily disbelieves all that is not solidly proved true, while carefully rejecting all new data and observations which conflict with the widely accepted theories of the time. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 8:02 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: To the Japanese in 1941, Americans seemed outlandish. To the skeptics who agree with Cude or Close, we are the ones disconnected from reality. We are illogical and even mentally ill thinking that we can fuse hydrogen in a mason jar. I do not think it does any good getting angry at such people. It is important that you understand their mindset. ***Okay, Jed. What we need as a group is a minimum set of facts that we agree are incontrovertible. Sure, but we cannot expect people like Cude to agree with any of them. A person can always find a reason to dismiss something. Cude says that the tritium results may all be mistakes or fraud. Jones Beene accused him of being intellectually dishonest, but I assume Cude is sincere. Bockris tallied up tritium reports and said that over 100 labs detected it. If I were Cude, this would give me pause. I find it impossible to imagine there are so so many incompetent scientists, I cannot think of why scientists would publish fake data that triggers attacks on their reputation by the Washington Post. What would be the motive? But I am sure that Cude, and Park, and the others sincerely believe that scientists are deliberately trashing their own reputations by publishing fake data. I would think it is that Pons Fleischmann were careful electrochemists, the preeminent of their day. Of course they were, but no skeptic will agree. Fleischmann was the president of the Electrochemical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but Cude and the others are convinced he was a sloppy, mentally ill criminal. That's what they say, and I do not think they would say it if they did not believe it. That the physicists who chose to debunk their findings were far from careful due to inexperience in electrochemistry and this led to their negative findings. There were many reasons experiments failed in 1989. Some of the failed experiments were carefully done, but they used the wrong diagnostics. Most of them looked for neutrons instead of heat. That there have been 14,700 replications of the P-F anomolous heat effect. If not, then how many? 180, as per Storms and National Instruments? Those are two different tallies. The 14,700 is the number of individual positive runs reported in the literature for all techniques, including glow discharge. 180 is the number of laboratories reporting success. Some of those labs saw excess heat many times. If 180 labs measure excess heat 10 times each, that would be 1,800 positive runs in the Chinese tally. I do not know where the Chinese got their data. Presumably from published papers. I have not gone through papers counting up positive and negative runs. What are the base minimum set of facts that we all agree on? If we include the skeptics there is not a single fact we all agree on. Not one. Cude looks at Fig. 1 in the McKubre paper and says the peak at 94% loading means nothing. I think he says it is the result of random effects or cherry-picked data. I look at it and say it proves there is a controlling parameter (loading) that cannot possibly cause artifactual excess heat, so this proves the effect is real. I say that even if only 20% achieve high loading, the other 80% are not relevant. Even if only one in a million achieved high loading this would still prove the effect is real. Cude looks at the preponderance of cells that do not achieve high loading and he concludes that they prove this graph is meaningless noise. There is absolutely no reconciling our points of view. From my point of view, his assertion is scientifically illiterate. He does not seem to understand how graphs work, and what it means to say that data is significant rather than noise. From his point of view, McKubre, Storms and I have no idea what we are talking about and this graph is no more
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
So, here's two cases where Joshua Cude and Jed Rothwell concur about evidence. ***It is this kind of common ground and base set of facts that we should try to establish as a group. If anyone comes along hoping to debunk it, they can read the base set of facts and either move on or engage with us. If I were to try to log onto a unicorn discussion group, and they were all obviously unicorn 'believers', what is the point of trying to separate them from their unicornian beliefs? But if they cite genuine historical evidence that they rely on to pursue their belief system, and we're invited to investigate that evidence rationally, then there is some common ground between us. For a non-unicornian to try to impose his viewpoint that if unicorns are real, they must be amphibians, is beyond the pale for unicornians. But for a rule to exist that all participants should adhere to the belief that unicorns can fly is also beyond the pale. The common ground is what we need to establish. On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Rich Murray rmfor...@gmail.com wrote: I think many people have expressed highly skeptical view of BLP, Rossi and others here. I think most of this skepticism is justified! -- Jed Rothwell So, here's two cases where Joshua Cude and Jed Rothwell concur about evidence. The claims about Toyota's successes are indeed extraordinary evidence: They achieved high reproducibility, routinely triggering boil offs in 64 cells at a time. The work culminated with cells that ran for weeks at boiling temperature, at 40 to 100 W. See: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RouletteTresultsofi.pdf [ 9 pages ] This project was terminated because of politics and disputes over money between Toyota and other companies, not because the research itself failed. -- Jed Rothwell Roulette, T., J. Roulette, and S. Pons. Results of ICARUS 9 Experiments Run at IMRA Europe. in Sixth International Conference on Cold Fusion, Progress in New Hydrogen Energy. 1996. Lake Toya, Hokkaido, Japan: New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan. RESULTS OF ICARUS 9 EXPERIMENTS RUN AT IMRA EUROPE T. Roulette, J, Roulette, and S. Pons IMRA Europe, S.A., Centre Scientifique Sophia Antipolis, 06560 Valbonne , FRANCE INTRODUCTION We describe herein the construction, testing, calibration and use of a high power dissipation calorimeter suitable for the measurements of excess enthalpy generation in Pd / Pd alloy cathodes during the electrolysis of heavy water electrolytes at temperatures up to and including the boiling point of the electrolyte. With the present design, power dissipation up to about 400W is possible. Excess power levels of up to ~250% of the input power have been observed with these calorimeters in some experiments. Extensions of the design to include recombination catalysts on open and pressurized cells will be the subject of a future report. 2 of 7 runs, months long, gave excess heat. no details about how the Pd cathodes were prepared and changed. no references are given. how qualified are T. and J. Roulette? Joshua Cude, would you comment on this on newvortex? within the fellowship of service, Rich Murray On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 8:47 AM, Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.comwrote: Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: There is plenty of room to be skeptical that LENR will ever get to market. Cude was correct on that point. I think that airing alternative viewpoints on the subject of what it takes for commercialization can be quite productive for the future of the field. Exactly right. Plus there are many technical claims that are questionable or not repeated yet. Host metal transmutation is not as well established as, say, tritium. Iwamura has done good work and Toyota replicated him, but it is still long way from the tritium results. Many of us really resent the efforts of those who want to impugn many years of quality research at Universities, SRI, National Labs and so on - by top researchers. Sure, there is some research which is substandard, but that is not the point. The existing level of good research almost certainly proves than nuclear reactions can occur at low temperature. Yup, I resent that! To be in denial of that evidence by skeptics is no more than intellectual dishonesty. Maybe it is with some people. But I think the debate is reasonably fair. Most supporters and skeptics who are wrong (wrong in my opinion) are making honest mistakes, or they are ignorant, or they interpret the data wrong. Cude strikes me as honest in his opinions. I think he sincerely believes that McKubre Fig. 1 has no significance, because most cells do not achieve the high loading shown there. That is a mistake, not dishonest. He does not understand the point of this graph. Perhaps he should make more of an effort to understand, but we can't fault people for misunderstanding. This
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sun, 12 May 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote: Which would be in violation of Rule 2, as well. How about this part: Note that small-s skepticism of the openminded sort is perfectly acceptable on Vortex-L. We crackpots don't want to be *completely* self-deluding. :) The ban here is aimed at Debunkers; at certain disbelief and its self-superior and archly hostile results, and at the sort of Skeptic who angrily disbelieves all that is not solidly proved true, while carefully rejecting all new data and observations which conflict with the widely accepted theories of the time. But if you wish to adopt a prior stance of disbelief before investigation, and then become selective of evidence, and then permanently maintain your viewpoint against any changes whatsoever, and label this being skeptical ...that belongs on some other forum. Try JREF and others listed on my page at http://amasci.com/weird/wskept.html This old essay on the scientific attitude hits it exactly: Keep your bead on the wire http://amasci.com/freenrg/bead.html Science is above all tentative. People with sliding beads regarding CF (etc.) are not debunkers. And debunkers are not scientists, debunkers are the police who know the law and who chase the bad guys. Who then decides whether a crime has been committed: who the bad guys are? That's the judiciary. But the Skeptic community has none who can, for example, globally write a law after *extensive openminded investigation,* a law which declares that CF is True Bunk, and now sends the entire skeptic community down upon us. Or a law saying CF is still not settled and open to question, and all debunkers are legally required to leave those guys alone and go concentrate as usual on the ripoffs and the self-promotors of truely dangerous ignorance. It seems that anything (to put it politely) is on-topic here but a critical view on LENR. Nope. I respond to complaints, and especially to large amounts of traffic coming from someone using a fake name. If you want to be devil's advocate, just don't be an avowed debunker, and please include a sig to let us see your CV etc. (Heh, I still haven't added a forum rule about the continuing problem of people who use fake names to avoid any need to man up and take personal responsibility. Too many need to use fake names for legit reasons.) (( ( ( ( ((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]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
Kevin O'Malley kevmol...@gmail.com wrote: We need to know where to draw the line. Which facts do we consider so obvious that when someone denies them, they're a debunker rather than small 's' skeptic. It is a judgement call. Science is objective, yet at the finest level of detail, it is a judgement call. It has a strange duality. The key question has always been: How many replications does it take to ensure an effect is real? Everyone will have a different answer. A knowledgeable person will want to look at the papers, and evaluate the skills of the researchers, the choice of instruments, the signal to noise ratios and so on. For an experimental finding as surprising as cold fusion, I think most people will demand 5 or 10 quality replications from professional labs. What constitutes quality is partly matter of opinion. Somewhere between 10 replications and 180, it becomes irrational to deny the effect is real. Is that number 15? 20? 50? Only you can decide, but I would say that by 1990 there were so many replications of heat and tritium that any continued doubts were irrational. A Bayesian analysis sheds some light on this. (See Johnson and Melich). Still, deciding exactly where you draw the line becomes a little like Mandelbrot's question: how long is the coast of England? The closer you look, the fuzzier it becomes. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
On Sat, 11 May 2013, Joshua Cude wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Or, just stick with the greater world of weird-but-nonCF subjects, where you see that the evidence is not yet decisive, and there's low chance of triggering a Believer vs. Debunker debate. This isn't a CF-only forum, though it tends to function as one! :) I push the crackpot-friendly aspect as a long-time experiment in Provisional Acceptance of crazy hypotheses. Currently in science, at least where weird topics are concerned, we instead operate with a philosophy of Provisional Disbelief, where we allow the evidence convince us to change our minds. But since disbelief is itself a strong bias, what happens if we test the opposite technique, and provisionally accept weird topics in order to study them?Just try it, and everyone attacks you: You actually BELIEVE in that crap?!! ANYONE WHO TAKES THAT STUFF SERIOUSLY IS A CRACKPOT. And of course the uncritical Believers want to welcome you into the fold. This above situation strongly suggests that certain topics have never been given a chance in the past. If each time someone tries to give them a chance, and is stopped by colleages, then we may actually have no idea whether those topics are truely Woo or not, since nobody is allowed to take them seriously enough to properly do the homework before making an informed decision. If we have to take on the (perceived) crackpot mantle in order to do proper homework, then that's exactly what's needed: declare oneself to be a True Believer Raving Loonie, then have at it. (Perhaps use a fake name here in order to protect one's professional rep.) http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Even so, I believe that many scientists have a habit of rejecting new ideas because they unknowingly maintain an illusory worldview which is based on concensus of colleagues, rather than upon evidence, and as a result they become irrational. They become very intolerant of all ideas which violate that consensus, and will instantly and thoughtlessly reject the evidence supporting such ideas. This forum is for scientist-types (including amateurs!) with a low tolerance for anything resembling mob-rule, and a high tolerance for those crazy hypotheses. (( ( ( ( ((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]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
There are a lot of opinions that can dramatically lower one's evolutionary fitness if expressed. For example, when Moses came down with his tablets and was, shall we say, depressed by the reception -- he asked for the opinion of those around him and those who agreed with him were then ordered to kill everyone else. Civilization HO!!! On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 11:00 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: On Sat, 11 May 2013, Joshua Cude wrote: I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Or, just stick with the greater world of weird-but-nonCF subjects, where you see that the evidence is not yet decisive, and there's low chance of triggering a Believer vs. Debunker debate. This isn't a CF-only forum, though it tends to function as one! :) I push the crackpot-friendly aspect as a long-time experiment in Provisional Acceptance of crazy hypotheses. Currently in science, at least where weird topics are concerned, we instead operate with a philosophy of Provisional Disbelief, where we allow the evidence convince us to change our minds. But since disbelief is itself a strong bias, what happens if we test the opposite technique, and provisionally accept weird topics in order to study them?Just try it, and everyone attacks you: You actually BELIEVE in that crap?!! ANYONE WHO TAKES THAT STUFF SERIOUSLY IS A CRACKPOT. And of course the uncritical Believers want to welcome you into the fold. This above situation strongly suggests that certain topics have never been given a chance in the past. If each time someone tries to give them a chance, and is stopped by colleages, then we may actually have no idea whether those topics are truely Woo or not, since nobody is allowed to take them seriously enough to properly do the homework before making an informed decision. If we have to take on the (perceived) crackpot mantle in order to do proper homework, then that's exactly what's needed: declare oneself to be a True Believer Raving Loonie, then have at it. (Perhaps use a fake name here in order to protect one's professional rep.) http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.**htmlhttp://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Even so, I believe that many scientists have a habit of rejecting new ideas because they unknowingly maintain an illusory worldview which is based on concensus of colleagues, rather than upon evidence, and as a result they become irrational. They become very intolerant of all ideas which violate that consensus, and will instantly and thoughtlessly reject the evidence supporting such ideas. This forum is for scientist-types (including amateurs!) with a low tolerance for anything resembling mob-rule, and a high tolerance for those crazy hypotheses. (( ( ( ( ((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]:MODERATOR: J. Cude, extensive Rule 2 violations
OK. My apologies. Like I said before, I came to post a review of Hagelstein's editorial, which, although negative, I did not think violated rule 2. And then, of course, I can't resist replying to direct responses to stuff I write, and it spiraled outta control. I'm not interested in an inaccessible (non-archived) list like vortex-b, so I'll just slink away. I may post a few responses to Rothwell's latest replies over on wavewatching.net/fringe if they tolerate it. Otherwise, adios. It's been a slice. On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 5:25 PM, William Beaty bi...@eskimo.com wrote: Please immediately move all debunking to VortexB-L. Vortex' Rule 2 is intended to prevent debunking-based postings here. Also please read: On Wed, 8 May 2013, Edmund Storms wrote: What is the usefulness of all this discussion. Cude will not accept the most obvious and well supported arguments and he will not accept what I just said here. Yes, such discussions usually prove pointless. A simple problem with a simple solution: DEBUNKING IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN ON VORTEX-L. If you see some, it's probably coming from someone who didn't read the forum rules: http://amasci.com/weird/wvort.**html#ruleshttp://amasci.com/weird/wvort.html#rules It's not just about no sneering. Skeptics are not welcome here. Vortex-L exists to provide a Believer forum which stays far away from the message traffic and time wasted in discussions with staunch non- Believers. There's plenty of other groups for such topics if you want to indulge (including vortexB-L.) And, if rule #2 isn't clear enough, well, here's the expanded version: http://amasci.com/weird/vmore.**htmlhttp://amasci.com/weird/vmore.html Note well: I started this group as an openminded quiet harbor for interested parties to discuss the Griggs Rotor away from the believer-skeptic uproar on sci.physics.fusion. It quickly mutated into a believers forum for discussion of cold fusion and other anomalous physics. I created Rule #2 to prevent this list from becoming another battleground like the sci.physics.fusion newsgroup. Be warned: IF YOU SELF-IDENTIFY AS NON-WOO, THEN YOU COULD BE REMOVED FROM THE FORUM AT ANY TIME. PS Hey, part of that old article in THE SKEPTIC is now on google books... Skepticism and Credulity, Finding balance between Type-I and -II errors http://goo.gl/jU5Zf Another one: BERKUN, Why smart people defend bad ideas http://scottberkun.com/essays/**40-why-smart-people-defend-**bad-ideas/http://scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/ (( ( ( ( ((O)) ) ) ) ))) William J. BeatySCIENCE HOBBYIST website billb amasci comhttp://amasci.com EE/programmer/sci-exhibits amateur science, hobby projects, sci fair Seattle, WA 206-762-3818unusual phenomena, tesla coils, weird sci
