From Jed:
... Interesting comments snipped... ...
Let's wait to see if anyone actually makes a ZPE OU motor. I doubt it will happen. Unlike Newcomb and Close, I do not pretend to have sophisticated technical justifications for this belief. I doubt it because it is an apparent violation of the conservation of energy, because no one has done it yet as far as I know, despite strenuous efforts by lots of people. - Jed
A practical assessment of the situation. I hope some readers will humor me briefly as I make a temporary detour. Hopefully the detour might make some sense at the conclusion. The difficulties in predicting what new inventions will manifest remind me of how commodity traders ply their trade. There are countless books authored by "professional" commodity traders who claim they became rich by exploiting what was about to happen. Just buy their book and you too can become fabulously wealthy - if you study the enclosed principals hard enough! /:-p I've studied several amazing trading systems. One theory even included incorporating lunar phases which, I kid you not, was tantalizing. Commodity trading patterns become crystal clear after the effect. Any teacher can appear as a wise expert while teaching their students specific "universal" trading patterns and how anyone can profit from them by knowingly exploiting those characteristics in a timely manner. The trick is to have the wisdom, that special sixth sense, to -know- which "universal" pattern is about the play out. The decision making fickleness I personally experienced, and paid substantially for as "tuition" while I was learning to trade (unsuccessfully I might add), suggested to me that there are few geniuses nor software algorithms capable of determining which of a myriad number of universal trading patterns is about to play out. When generated patterns are based on millions of human decisions to buy or sell an item, often on a whim that can change in seconds, literally, ...well, one can see the challenge of making an accurate prediction! Hell! Molecules randomly jumping about in a enclosed container while expressing ZEE (the Zen of Enlightened Entropy) often seem to behave like a bunch of traders - which incidentally has probably led more than one New Age pilgrim to ponder the notion that the Universe must be one humongous living organism, because it's so damn difficult to predict what the dang thing is going to do next! Oh, what the hell...double or nothing! What's all this commodity trading have to do with Alternative Energy? What's it got to do with predicting which enterprise is destined to break free from the starting gate? From my perspective commodity trading patterns occasionally remind me of what's happening in the AE field. Will it be BLP, MPI, STEORN, SPRAIN, CF, SOLAR, WIND, ALGOIL, or a weird combination of a multi-disciplined approach. I suspect the universal pattern that eventually manifests is likely to look obvious to most of us, almost as if it was a no-brainer. Viewing events from a historical perspective tends to make wise men out of most of us. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com
