At 02:05 AM 2/24/2011, Rich Murray wrote:
Abd,
Thanks for your generous, civil response to Terry's "idiot" -- uh,
naturally, it increases my confidence in you when you show up as the
only one to fully understand and support my simple "The Emperor has no
clothes..." critique about the error by SPAWAR of thinking an
external high voltage DC field would be "felt" within a conducting
electrolyte.
To be fair to SPAWAR, they thought they saw a difference, and, after
all, experiment trumps theory. But this particular theory is a whole
lot more established than some vague concept that LENR is impossible.
SPAWAR abandoned that line of inquiry, it seems. In the Galileoo
protocol, they originally suggested using a magnetic field. A
magnetic field might actually do something, it could influence
conductive crystal growth at the surface of the cathode, perhaps. It
turned out, though, that Pem said she'd been making assumptions,
confusing what they'd found with nickel cathodes.
It is always possible to get mildly significant results from chance.
Given the chaotic nature of CF phenomena, it's a particular hazard.
It would be nice if at some point, someone from SPAWAR would
acknowledge the problem. The problem, in fact, should have been
acknowledged in the very first paper, that an effect from an external
electric field would be very contrary to expectation, but they
treated it otherwise, as I recall. The publication also somewhat
impeaches the reviewers, who should have questioned this, big time.
Hindsight is wonderful, isn't it? People make mistakes, everyone
makes mistakes. We have peculiar blind spots, sometimes.
Your double sandwitch of active layers, only fitted together at the
very start of exposure, is a really elegant way to reduce background
clutter -- a third layer perpendicular to the sandwitch to catch
glazing impacts is another very elegant feature -- can you set up a
web cam to share online real time and continuously record what you see
during runs with a microscope, while setting an audio alarm to go off
when a flash occurs?
Well, theoretically, the microscope is a USB device. I can take
videos with it, but I think I have to download them, I don't think it
will do live video, this one. I have another one that will. However,
I don't think I'll go for live, at this point, too much complication
on the connection end. And, I expect, it would be pretty boring.
Again, setting up analysis for a flash would be work that I'm not up
to. The microscope was not designed for this, and it has automatic
level control. I really don't know what I'll see. I'm just going to look!
Because of the thickness of the cell wall, I can't use the microscope
at maximum magnification, i.e., I'll be using the 10x lens, which
gives me 100x. It's a 1200 x 1600 pixel CCD; I'm not sure how I'll
set it up. (I made a custom stage, so that the cell is held upright,
while the microscope is laying on its side. Acrylic is great stuff,
I've found.)
Joshua Cude may be a scout, an agent provacateur who is testing the CF
network to find its most competent members.
Maybe. He has a coolness that is remarkable. I made a few mistakes,
and he pinned them immediately. That's rare. More commonly with a
pseudoskeptic, they are so certain you are wrong that they don't pay
attention to the arguments at all, so mistakes pass unnoticed.
Indeed, I was writing off the top of my head, for most of it, and
some of what I wrote, that he caught, I'd written many times!
By the way, I still have not confirmed that what he wrote was
correct, and it might not have been. (I'm talking about the process
for the 2004 DoE review.) But he was very definite and clear, and a
quick check did not confirm what I had written ..., so ..., my
interest is truth and clarity, not "winning" or trying to prove that
I never make mistakes. I make mistakes. Let's get that one out of the
way immediately! I'll eventually find a deeper source, or personal
testimony from those involved. I haven't asked yet.
The key that something was really off was, though, that he'd make
sweeping statements that were clearly false, such as no peer-reviewed
confirmation of heat/helium after Miles in 1993. I cited the counter-examples.
If those had been errors, I'd think he'd have pinned those, too.
Perhaps what I thought was peer-reviewed wasn't. (One can't always
tell by the journal, and I didn't check the actual articles.) And he
put great emphasis on this alleged absence, when, in fact, as to
science, peer-reviewed papers provide additional confidence, that's
true, but a reviewer writing a review of the field does his or her
own screening of sources, and may use even private communications,
whatever, and, then, if there is something off about the choice of
sources, those who review the review would consider that!
Testimony is testimony.
In any case, Cude did not respond to that, but simply continued to
make the original assertion. That was huge. This is someone, then,
interested in creating text that will support a particular
conclusion. It will show up in internet searches. Someone reading it
may not go ahead and read the rest. It's a political move. And he has
no cost, no reputation to maintain, he can lie as much as he likes
and it would seem to cost him nothing.
Except later, when he has to live with himself. And there are people
who really don't care about that, it's a pathology. There are people
who don't care about their personal reputation, either, but that's a
different pathology, if it is pathology at all.
I will join the CF network at Wikiversity -- maybe I can start groups
to work with the toxicity of aspartame (methanol, formaldehyde, formic
acid), and on the subtle details in the deepest Hubble Ultra Deep
Field.
Sure. Right now, Wikiversity is a mess. The administrators have
basically abandoned ship, almost all of them, with the rest
scratching their heads trying to figure out how to handle dedicated,
unresponsive bullying. Wikiversity is highly block-averse, or has
become so. But if there is no enforcement, there exist people who
will defy all social pressure; some have assumed that everyone will
be reasonable, that disagreements can all be resolved by discussion,
etc. It's a good working hypothesis, but it breaks down if it's taken
as a fixed rule! So how does one selectively apply enforcement
without creating oppression? It can be done, but the community has
been resistant or distracted.
Anyway, probably you won't have trouble there, if you are careful
about how you proceed. Let me know what you are doing, I'll help you.
Wikiversity is a WMF wiki, there is an overall neutrality policy, but
... you can do original research, it's all in how you present it.
Take a look at the Cold fusion resource on Wikiversity. There are
some clues there. As you dig down through the seminars, you will find
all kinds of stuff. Original research. Arguments and debates. My
goal, there, is to take debates and extract points from them, so that
issues become clear. The summaries go up in the hierarchy, the source
debates go down, linked for historical reference. So what is built is
soundly educational, which requires filtering for significance.
I try to write summaries in a rigorously neutral way, and opinion
will be attributed.
As to working with me on the cold fusion resource, that you might
have something to learn is a very good thing. That you have
criticisms developed over many years (years ago, you were away from
the field for a long time), is also a good thing. All these
criticisms should be documented and examined. If you are a genuine
skeptic -- and I think you are -- then some of the criticisms you
will come to recognize as misdirected or in error, and others may,
then, rise in importance and be addressed. There are criticisms that
I have of the field, and there are prominent researchers in the field
that agree with them.
Science is not about taking sides and pushing for conclusions.
Indeed, much of it is about postponing conclusions until the evidence
is clear. That was, in fact, the sensible sense behind the 1989 and
2004 DoE reports. The pseudoskeptics want to treat the matter as
closed, but those reviews did not treat it that way. The first review
concluded that there wasn't convincing evidence for cold fusion,
noted the reasons to doubt that Pons and Fleischmann had discovered
d-d fusion at room temperature.
And all that was reasonable, given the evidence they had. I claim
that in 2004, the "overall sense" (moderately negative) was not
reasonable, there are clear signs of attachment to prior conclusions
among the experts. But that's certainly debatable! The real point
about 2004 was that a general sense of there being something worth
looking at had very palpably increased. This is quite the opposite of
what would be expected with "pathological science," but someone like
Cude will search for ways to frame the report to make it seem
otherwise. Generally, "believers" have rejected the report, taking an
opposite tack to mine, which is simply to note certain errors in the
report, but also to note how much the report was *different* from
1989. The pseudoskeptics have generally framed the report using a
sentence from the conclusion that makes it appear that nothing had
changed since 1989, but, in fact, what had not changed was generally
the overall conclusion *as to funding.* Then the pseudoskeptic makes
or uses the implied assumption that, if CF were real, they'd have
recommended throwing billions of dollars at it, and, therefore, the
conclusion must be read as "not real."
When we look at the details of the report, we can see, in one
important case at least, exactly where some of the reviewers went
astray. There are clear, blatant errors, easy to recognize once you
know where to look. Those errors are not minor, they undermined the
most important evidence, not only for some kind of LENR, but for
deuterium fusion (mechanism unknown). Not errors of interpretation,
errors regarding the evidence itself. And we can cover that on
Wikiversity in detail, then it becomes possible to cover this with a
simple reference to a page there.
In other words, the work we do now, on Wikiversity, saves much work later on.
Originality is the spirited spice of dreams.
I haven't kept on cross-posting, as Vortex-L has become my active
venue for CF.
Cross-posting irritates people. You can, if you have written
something on one list that might be of interest to those on another,
post a link on the other list, if it would be of interest to some.
Cross-posting tends to create forks, and then people may feel that
they either have to abandon a discussion in one place, or write about
it in two, thus wasting a lot of time.
