Just being realistic James.
A simple 'couple hundred bucks' calorimeter is NOT going to satisfy the skeptics; they will pick it apart and another test would have been wasted. Getting a quality data-acquisition system and multiple thermocouples/RTDs so there is redundancy in the measurements (enough to satisfy everyone) would be way more than a few hundred bucks. In our testing we used a LAN-based, hi-res data acquisition unit from NI and it was over $1000, plus low-mass, fast response RTDs at $50 each. And who is going to put all this together???? I suppose you expect them to work for free too. Was some of the measurement equipment rented? The original comment is way too simplistic and unrealistic. All I am saying is that a budget of $20K for doing several tests like was done is actually pretty cheap when one considers ALL the aspects that require $$. Sure, Rossi could have purposely chosen this air method after taking considerable time to find clever ways to fake it, but it is just as likely that with all the accusations of fraud using the flow calorimeter in previous tests, that he and the test team tried to arrange a different setup to avoid previous criticisms. I think it prudent to wait and see if the 6 month test makes further improvements given the feedback from the recent tests. -Mark From: James Bowery [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 11:22 AM To: vortex-l Subject: Re: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe... Do the arithmetic, Mark. Although it is true that "a couple hundred bucks" is only 1% of $20,000 and that it is ridiculous think of the other 99% as going into technical aspects alone, even if 90% of the budget were for "overhead" that would still leave a budget of $2,000 for the technical aspects, which means "a couple hundred bucks" would be 10% of the available budget. Are you trying to say that adequate calorimetry wouldn't be worth even 10% of the budget allocated for equipment? On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 1:12 PM, MarkI-ZeroPoint <[email protected]> wrote: I would think that most of the $20K went to airfare, hotels and meals. you can't expect the scientists to work for free. -Mark From: James Bowery [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 9:42 AM To: vortex-l Subject: [Vo]:A Couple Hundred Bucks Maybe... I've seen it claimed by a rather emotionally committed skeptic -- with some background in conducting CF runs with calorimetry -- that an adequate 19th century technology water-bath style calorimetry of the E-Cat HT would cost "a couple hundred bucks maybe...". Obviously if this is true then the $20,000 budget for the E-Cat HT test available to Levi et al (2013) would have been more than adequate. Clearly, if this estimate is accurate then it is easy to understand why a skeptic might get emotionally committed to discounting the report: Why bother issuing such a report unless you were trying to mind-f*ck everyone? Of course, I can come up with any of a variety of plausible explanations for why this "couple hundred bucks" estimate may be way off but then I haven't actually conducted calorimetry on CF runs. So the question is "Did this skeptic get emotional because his estimate is correct or did he come up with his estimate because he was an emotional pseudo-skeptic?"
