Rossi vs IH: (Update: Sep. 9 20– James A. Bass now a Third Party in IH’s Counter Complaint)

Quote from THHuxley

STDM wrote:

Here is an expert review of Lugano, one of several Abd is aware of. That is, it is substantive, it is expertly written, and has conclusions that have withstood very considerable critiques, unlike the original report.

It is also very well known by everyone here so I don't understand the point of your question.

Thanks, THH. That was certainly not why I blocked STDM. I don't block people for asking inconvenient questions. I would just ignore them -- or decline to respond -- if I had that reaction. I block them for a high density of trolling comments, occasionally for repeated and fingers-stuffed-in-ears argument, and rarely (once?) for a single post beyond the pale, clearly demonstrating the uselessness of conversation.

There is no ready way to go back, and "blocking" is not a serious action. It is easily done and easily undone. Because posts still show up in Unread, and for other reasons, I may still notice posts of blocked users. In this case, I don't recall the exact occasion for the block, but the behavior displayed here (mind-reading to create a "weak" motive, trolling for response, I'd think), if part of a repeated pattern, would be enough.

Of course there are expert reviews, and I had in mind McKubre and have mentioned that one at least once. It becomes tedious to repeat this stuff over and over. So I'm glad to leave that job to others.

Jed wrote:

Quote

Here is another by McKubre, which is less technical, therefore easier to understand:infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue118/analysis.html

The review is quite good for the most part, and you know I am not fond of McKubre (scientifically of course... personally, I don't know him). But then he has to go say something like the below:

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On the whole I am encouraged. Considerably more work is obviously needed to validate the adopted mode of calorimetry and support better sampling and testing. But we are given something we can sink our teeth into both experimentally and theoretically: testable fuel to products nuclear burn at temperatures that have practical, economic and social potential. These are exciting times and Rossi (and his sponsors) and the research team of Levi, Foschi, Höistad, Pettersson and Tegnér, as well as Hanno Essén, are to be commended for their tenacious pursuit of what at times must have seemed a thankless job. The world looks forward to more.

Instead of that, he should have noted that using a thermal camera and a hot cat hung out in plain air without forced cooling is a simply idiotic way to try to demonstrate that the ecat concept and fuel formula work. He should have remarked how much easier it is to use a low temperature ecat and a setup like Levi's original fluid cooled mass flow (forced flow) arrangement but of course with proper calibration which Levi never did. I wonder if he made the conclusion I cited above, knowing about Rossi's extensive criminal background and past failures including the thermoelectric debacle in which he defrauded DOD and delivered junk. If he know about it, he should have mentioned it, even if politely. It bears on the credibility of all Rossi-involved tests. If he didn't know about it, he should have done better background research. But the actual discussion is quite good and quite complete. I just wish he had given more consideration to the possibility of cheating, fraud, and sleight of hand... especially because it is looking more and more clearly like that is all the ecat ever was and is.

Quote from "FUD Abd in slander mode"

Perhaps you can"t help but wonder because this paranoia is endemic. No. He has nothing to do with IH, nor with APCO, nor with Jones Day. His suggestion came after I had begun to comment. As to "flooding forums," well, your forum may be flooded. Mine has one less writer cluttering it, Timar. We are free to select what we read.I've been reading back, old Gluck posts, etc. Veritable mountains of drek. People agreeing back and forth over total nonsense. Like e-catnews? Feel free to "invest" your time there!When I block, I always look at the posting history, to see if I might be missing something of value. Nope. Just distraction, temptations to respond to unreal questions, pokes and prods and fluff.

"Mountains of drek" ... you dont say... Browsing through the endless flow of Abdulla subjective pseudo legal "analysis" BS, this comment stands out from a psychological perspective... And as for "flooding", I guess you could feel that way since you do not have to read your own posts... That would reduce the flood significantly. Your lack of self-awareness in this respect is amazing ... (and you are supposed to be "trained"... ehh?)

My take is that the Apco references ticks you off for a reason... Of course your lawyer friend is an Apco/JD op. Why would he otherwise bother about you vomiting dog shit all over the place? Your motives are way to transparent for your role Abdulla - reflect-repent-reboot... (or go talk to the dog prophet of yours ... she might have a clue)

Quote from Shane D.

Sifferkoll,

Hydrofusion could end some, or all, of this madness right now if they simply sold one of their 1MWs to a real customer. Or at the least, make a public statement of support for Rossi and the Ecat technology they are licensed to sell. Maybe mention plans going forward, or something like that. Doing so would keep APCO at bay, bring IH back to the negotiating table, and maybe even put Abd at a loss for words.

HFs total silence though...while understandable to Alan, speaks volumes to me.

Take care.

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Loss for words? I'll die first. That, folks, is a real possibility at my age. I just had a nuclear stress test. I'm still a little radioactive, I don't have a Geiger counter or I'd check, they use Technetium 99m. Metastable state, cool! Metastable nuclei may be involved in the cold fusion missing gammas. Technetium 99m has a half-life of 6 hours.

This test was in a cardiology office. The tech told me she gets the Tc each morning. She mentioned the issue of shortages and that there are now "moly cows," and so ... I think a local hospital is distributing 99mTc every morning, or some business. She said the cost of the 99mTc for each procedure was $20. If used continually, a moly cow could produce all the needs for a local region. According to the Wikipedia article, they need replacement weekly.

I talked with the physician's assistant administering the stress test, herself. She said that she wears a film badge. Some time back, it was showing low but measurable exposure. The others involved were not showing that. They realized that she was positioning herself closer to the patient, supporting him or her. Her manner was excellent. Because I asked, she spent substantial time going over the images from the gamma camera. These are 142 keV gammas, and I wondered how they imaged. I could tell from the camera that there were really two cameras, at ninety degrees from each other. I guessed they were using pinholes. I guessed correctly.

Because of Rossi v. Darden, Rossi cannot arrange the sale of the two or three reactor assemblies that were made. He would have to build new reactors. But if he is willing to work with others, that could readily be done in Sweden. If HF actually has working reactors, putting them to work for the sale of heat would be an obvious move. If this actually happened, I would be thrilled. So would IH, I suspect, because it might only take a little legal action and they would be filthy rich.

The obstacle to this is certainly not IH, nor is it the fantasy army of "paid FUD." It would be Rossi himself, and how he has treated his "partners." Instead of focusing on marketing what he has, he is following will-o-the-wisps, $89 million that he is not going to get from IH -- even if his reactor worked! -- and "improvements" that create endless postponements of what he has said is the only real test: the market. I've known engineers like that. If management doesn't restrain them, they can kill a company because of market delay.

Quote from Shane D.

STDM wrote:

All of those are circumstantial evidence, and can be differently interpreted. The IH $10 million was not evidence of reality, but evidence of some level of possibility. With a trillion dollar per year possible market opportunity, just how much of a possibility is necessary to justify $10 million? Even though game theory says something like "0.001%" investments are not ordinarily made with such low probabilities. So IH had another motive, to find out, to clear the decks, to create independent testing (their own! this was not about convincing others), and to buy a hedge against the possibility -- which was damaging LENR funding.

The Lugano report was defective and flawed from the beginning. Penon? Besides the fact that we have not seen it, IH is plausibly claiming this was fraud. Fabiani, the same. There was definitely fraud involved in the "test" setup.

Focardi would be like the "independent professors." Not exactly grounded and careful.

No, what will convince genuine skeptics is conclusive independent testing, published and confirmed. ("Market" is really a synonym for this. If I can buy an E-cat and test it ... independent testing!) Rossi avoided this by only "selling" $1.5 million 1 MW reactors. IH called his bluff, we could say, or, at least, decided they needed to know.

Yes. Circumstantial evidence.

Yes. Rossi has been claiming things like that for years. Sometimes he claims it publicly. Other times he releases the information privately, so it becomes a rumor. And sometimes there are rumors with no actual foundation, someone misinterpreted something somewhere and repeated it to another who trusted his source.

This would still take a process. And "ardent skeptics" -- which is intrinsically pseudoskeptics, because real skeptics are not "ardent" -- may never actually be convinced, their pseudonyms will shut up and blow away.

LENR, my thesis, actually turned the corner sometime around 2004, but the rejection cascade is heavily entrenched, with obvious errors repeated as fact in media stories. It takes time to overcome a major information cascade.

However, the situation in the journals is different. Cold fusion papers are being published in mainstream journals. Most of the publication did go to JCMNS, which tends to not impress the mainstream, and that is understandable.

The publication of many papers in Current Science last year was a remarkable event. Even Wikipedia currently allows mention. It's too bad that nobody with serious Wikipedia experience has pushed for a neutral article.

That mention of Current Science is, ironically, "original research," and would be easily shot down. But the article is full of original research on the other side, or, more difficult to handle, "reliable sourced" material that is very old and obsolete, whereas more recent information with stronger sourcing remains excluded. (Everyone who was or became knowledgeable about cold fusion was banned, even if they were very careful about policy. That's Wikipedia, vulnerable to factions, particularly when they include administrators or their friends.)

The Current Science articles themselves, where they are reviews or secondary sources, should be usable. My article on the reproducible experiment (heat/helium correlation), for example, should be usable. The article still has practically no information about the heat/helium correlation; what it has is incorrect, based on a misinterpretation of evidence in the 2004 U.S. DoE review, which is, itself, not necessarily a reliable source. The key finding with helium was correlation. That is not mentioned. This could even be sourced from Huizenga, who noted it in 1994 in his book. Attempts were made to improve that coverage many years ago. One can see that some of the same tendencies and people are still represented, such as TenOfAllTrades and JzG (both administrators) on the Talk page, who were most recently arguing for impact factor as a reason for excluding reliably sourced information. That's a classic factional argument, and it violates Wikipedia policies. Impact factor can be an element in deciding about conflict of sources, but not for exclusing reliably sourced information;' it could affect how the information is presented, i.e., as "fact" or as attributed evidence or claim. Wikipedia structure is highly vulnerable to this mess. This was the discussion:

[quote]Would the Journal of Visualized Experiments articles be a reliable source to be cited in the situation that some CF articles be available in it?--79.119.208.208 (talk) 17:28, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

Only if the results support the scientific consensus. It has very low Impact Factor, so can't be used to promote fringe views. Guy (Help!) 17:52, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

I say "yes". First, an impact factor of 1.325 is not low (comparatively, plenty of journals don't actually have impact factors). Second, it's still a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Banedon (talk) 01:12, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

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And then TenOfAllTrades argues against this. Whenever I took these kinds of issues to RfCs or other consensus process, these people would lose. So ... they solved the problem. They banned me.

Guy is a nonscientist who knows an electrochemist whom he talked to years ago, and Guy believes he knows what the "scientific consensus is," so he can make that assessment. There is no "Journal of Scientific Consensus." There is probably a general opinion, still, among physicists, that cold fusion was "rejected long ago," is how McKubre expressed it. But cold fusion is not actually a physics topic, as the mechanism is unknown. The experimental work is almost entirely chemistry. The article, like much ignorant speculation about cold fusion, is heavily theory-dependent. Brian Josephson (the Nobelist) has heavily confronted this at times. They would ban him if they could, but it's enough for them that they revert his changes (which are often "rejectable." Wikipedia policy is arcane, most get it completely wrong. But on fact, Brian was right. What was missing: support from ordinary editors.)

If anyone is interested in shifting the Wikipedia article toward what Wikipedia policy would require, contact me privately. It would not be difficult. I have suggested this before. The response is underwhelming. Most people do not care enough. it takes patience and focus.

Notice Guy's argument. "It cannot be used to promote fringe views." Is covering a topic on Wikipedia based on what is in reliable source "promoting fringe views"? That has been his position from the beginning, that such coverage was "promotion." He was obsessed with it. He has an obvious point of view that, expressed as he did, violated Wikipedia policies. He was actually reprimanded, but ... this is what administrators like him discovered. He could simply ignore it as long as he did not directly use his administrative tools. He could blatantly push his point of view, and did and continues to do so. Any ordinary user who does that (or who appears to do that as in my case) can easily be banned by the administrative cabal.

The cold fusion article is under "disretionary sanctions," a process that was more or less invented at the time I was involved. It seemed like a good idea, but the enforcement realities on Wikipedia simply gave adminstrators more power, and this has been used that way. Very few people know how to appeal to the Arbitration committee, it is enormously time-consuming, and raising a fuss is considered disruptive. It is not uncommon that someone raises an issue before the Committee, they are confirmed, and get banned. they shoot the messenger.

I was actually much more of a Wikipedian than a "cold fusion believer." I was attempting to move the article toward policy compliance. To do that took the presentation of evidence on the Talk page. And, of course, "wall of text!" Same old same old. It was working, so .... what happened happened.