On 2013-05-22 21:47, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Maybe there are more comments because people find the Disqus interface
easier to use than Forbes'. It allows corrections, and a popularity
vote. It is widely used these days.
Disqus is indeed more user friendly, but the amount of Facebook likes is
in my opinion a very good indicator of how popular a story is.
For that one, just a few hours ago it was at 5.5k likes, while it's
currently at 9.5k and still increasing very quickly.
I checked other articles on extremetech.com and the most popular ones
(eg Xbox One news) are at a few hundreds likes at most, with the
majority being under 100.
Actual page hits must be at least 5-6 times more than that, and
therefore more than those of the article on Forbes for the Rossi story.
Not that this is of any relevance to the third party report, I just
found interesting that such story on that relatively unknown (to me at
least) website could apparently become so popular.
We recently discussed here what percent of academic scientists believe
cold fusion is real. The only way to find out would be to conduct a
poll. You might get a sense of it by counting up the comments at
places like this. I think the CBS article associated with the "60
Minutes" would be a better sample. The problem is, these are
self-selected respondents, so the sample is skewed. You could perhaps
look for people who appear to be academic scientists but even that
would be distorted.
I doubt there is any way to establish the real numbers, other than a poll.
There is someone named "goat" something-or-other who writes incendiary
comments attacking cold fusion in various forums. It seems like an
obsession. He uses many obscenities and ad hominem attacks. He and
the people at Wikipedia need to get a life.
If you're referring to GoatGuy, he writes comments mainly on the
NextBigFuture blog as far as I know.
By the way, speaking of skeptic/negative views about the latest E-Cat
report, here's a well argumented one (or better than average, at least)
from a ScienceBlogs blogger:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/05/21/the-e-cat-is-back-and-people-are-still-falling-for-it/
Cheers,
S.A.
