Alan:
QuoteInterested? Could have fooled me Mary. You started from the position 'it's all crap' ...
Nonsense, Alan. I started examining Rossi's claims when I saw something in Google news about him in early 2011. Before that, I only heard of cold fusion as failure. I checked out Rossi's claims, just as I looked at Sniffex's and Steorn's, with an open mind and a great interest in the evidence. I only became critical of Rossi after it became clear to me that his experiments had major, obvious and glaring infelicities and that despite being told about them politely and plainly, he actively and vociferously resisted fixing them. After he insulted Krivit, based on an entirely reasonable and polite critique, instead of responding, I began to be highly suspicious of Rossi. Then I examined that lengthy paper about the thermoelectric stuff from DOD/CERL and noted that nobody had ever said they saw or tested the (I am sure imaginary) prototype, I could start to understand Rossi's modus operandi. Reading a few of Krivit's research-acquired documents about Petroldragon was also quite revealing. The so-called demo of the megawatt plant in November 2011, complete with the anonymous customer and the redoubtable NATO colonel and absolutely no credible data from the huge messy kludge, that cinched it for me. Rossi had to be a fraud. And guess how that turned out. Similarly with Defkalion and can Brillouin be far behind?
Ever since the early Rossi fiascos and misstatements and lies, I watched in wonderment as people who should know better, like for example Jed Rothwell and Brian Josephson, got sucked up into Rossi and Defkalion lies, farces and fantasies. And yes, all of that and what still goes on is still interesting.
What interested me about Rossi was the involvement of simple calorimetry which I know something about. I know nothing about electrochemistry and never said I did. I am therefore not interested in Pd-D work unless it shows replicated, current spectacular results and I've seen absolutely no evidence of that. If and when it does, I will try to learn more about it. That ain't now.
ETA: Oh and Alan, I did read several of the papers Jed recommended to me as smoking guns for high power LENR. Not one bore out the claims. I found many densely written with illegible or poorly structured figures and graphs and, to me, incomprehensible complex derived units on the axes. OK, maybe I just don't know how to read them but they made no sense. And I pretty much discount isoperibolic calorimetry because it is nothing but point temperature measurement (technicality for Jed: even so when the points are spread out over a small transducer) and that sort of measurement is liable to all kinds of errors, mismeasurement and the sort of calibration problem Kirk Shanahan talks about. Of course, Rossi never "bothered" with proper calibration. Hey, he already knew what it would show-- just ask him.