Steve, Frank et al. Speaking of this "incident" i.e.
> Charles called the "incident" a meltdown. I'm not quite sure why he labeled it as such..... The hole in the concrete floor was 30cm wide by 10cm deep. Somebody want to tell me that the concrete *melted*? I don't think so. >> That is an extremely valuable confirmation of the facts, Steve. As an expert in the failure of concrete I can definitely say, that ain't no meltdown. ;-) And also, remember the runaway incident of Vince Cockeram. It is too easy for the skeptics to call these incidents "anecdotal," because they are singularities that have not been reproduced, and were huge surprises even to the experimenters. They just were not supposed to happen. If one accepts that the accounts are true and accurate, of what has transpired, then that raises the level of evidence to a entirely different level above "anecdotal" IMHO. This is something that is so unusual in science, that the funders are at a total loss on how to proceed, in time of tight budgets due to unnecessary war. Personally, I have absolutely not doubt that the accounts are true and accurate accounts, so let's move on to the next step. What do we have here? To me, the best analogy is an ancient shipwreck. Let's say some dusty threadbare evidence has been found in a Madrid library about a treasure ship that went down five hundred years ago off the coast of Florida. A manifest of the contents is listed. OK this is somewhat anecdotal, right? Five hundred years clouds a lot of memories, and maybe the pirates got it first, or the manifest was faked, or maybe the captain absconded with the goods and called it a shipwreck, etc. etc. You can ignore it, which is what most people do, or you can try to do something about it. If you have $80,000 you can hire a small boat and a diver and search for a few years and probably turn up nothing. There is a lot of ocean out there. Like many visitors to Key West in thirty years ago, I met Mel Fisher in a bar (he made the rounds daily to all the bars) and was given the spiel on the Atocha. At the time, my thinking was more like Bob Park, and I thought this guy was nuts and wasting his time and the money or others. Fast forward, and we find Mel and his investors (and the great state of Florida) now several hundred million dollars wealthier, because he was able to overcome natural skepticism about second hand accounts that "appeared" reliable, and raise considerably more capital than other treasure hunters (it is addictive, I hear) in order to finance his dream. It paid off. The comparison here to cold fusion is that instead of several hundred million dollars found in the Atocha, finding the answer to either of the two" anecdotal" incidents, known and appreciated by the vortex crowd as accurate accounts, the payoff will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars...or is that an exaggeration? I think not. How much effort does that warrant? Certainly a quarter of the yearly hot fusion budget, no? Jones
