Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

    Quote from Forty-Two

    Ascolii, I would never trust any assessment from anybody who has ever defended Rossi’s e-cat claims.

    This guys have shown that their judgement is ill-affected by “wishful thinking”.


    Or would you trust a financial adviser who got once fooled by a Nigerian scammer?


    Sorry, I don't understand if you are in ironic mode or not. In any case, your comment gives me the opportunity to better clarify my position on this issue.


    JR has been by large the major public defendant of the Ecat results, not of Rossi as a person. This is an important distinction, to keep always in mind. Moreover, he vehemently defended those incredible results not on the basis of Rossi's claims, but on the basis of the evaluations made by authoritative people in the field. More specifically, his judgments were based on the assessments of several European academicians for the tests performed in Europe since 2011 (1), and on those expressed by several American experts for the tests previously carried out in the US (2).


    As for the trustworthy of his statements, I think that he is one of the most sincere protagonist of the CF/LENR community. He is such sincere, that he openly declares the basic rules of his communication strategy. But in this way he become as much puzzling as the man who says "In this village we are all liars". If you trust that man, you can't trust him anymore!


    Being more specific (otherwise JR jumps in, complaining that I'm inventing imaginary things about him), he wrote in 2012 (3) something similar to the above statement of the village's man: "One of the cardinal rules of being a good military leader or a good politician is to make do with what you have, and to find a way to win by subterfuge if you do not have a material or strategic advantage. Cold fusion is very much a political fight, so we should take lessons from these disciplines."


    After such a sincere declaration, should I always believe in what he says?


    (1) https://www.lenr-forum.com/for…D/?postID=29406#post29406

    (2) Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

    (3) http://www.mail-archive.com/vo…@eskimo.com/msg73665.html

    Quote from JedRothwell

    There you go again. That is a completely fantasy. Not even slightly true. I wish it were true. The history of cold fusion would be quite different if anyone had listened to me. Heck, it would be different if they had listened to Martin Fleischmann! As you see from his letters to Miles, he had no influence. If he had no influence, what makes you think I do?


    Please, don't misinterpret what I wrote and you quoted in your comment. I was talking about the Ecat issues, and the role you had in that history. Yes, you are also a reference figure in the whole history of cold fusion, but in the case of the Ecat saga your role went well beyond. For the references, please, see the links in some previous comments of mine (1a-c).


    Quote

    Only people with money have influence.


    Yes, true, but in pursuing their objectives they use people with less money, as you reminded to vorticians (2): "If word gets out that cold fusion is now attracting tens of millions in research funding, then most of the academic opposition will vanish overnight. Researchers everywhere will be applying for grants to study it.  As Stan Szpak says, "scientists believe whatever you pay them to believe."" [added emphasis]


    (1a) https://www.lenr-forum.com/for…D/?postID=29482#post29482

    (1b) https://www.lenr-forum.com/for…D/?postID=30088#post30088

    (1c) https://www.lenr-forum.com/for…D/?postID=30161#post30161

    (2) http://www.mail-archive.com/vo…@eskimo.com/msg97821.html

    Quote from woodworker

    I find it interesting that you seem very willing to craft an image and an opinion of Jed, his credibility, his positions, etc., but on the other hand you seem curiously unwilling to apply the same scrutiny and the same tests to Rossi. [...] You attack Jed based on his old statements, but you always seem to give Rossi the benefit of the doubt. Why is that?


    Because I completely agree with JR on what he said about Rossi in one of his first comment:

    Jan15, 2011 - http://www.mail-archive.com/vo…0eskimo.com/msg41324.html


    "This tells us that various professors at the university have been involved for some time, and they designed and implemented the calorimetry. I do not think there is any way Rossi could "fool" these people. I think that would be physically impossible. Rossi may be a crook but he could not persuade Levi to destroy his career. The fact that Levi and other established professors took part in the experiment is about 4 orders of magnitude more significant than what Rossi may have done, ..."


    [emphases added]


    I never considered Rossi a reliable source, so there is no need to scrutiny his credibility. It's clear that all of his credibility in LENR came from the positive evaluation on the performances of his devices made by some of the experts in the field. What is worth to investigate is why they supported such an evident farce.


    Rossi is not a nuclear scientist. He studied philosophy, and he has successfully applied this cultural background to his PR activity. Rossi was the perfect character to carry on such an incredible bluff, and now, after its debunking, his controversial past provides enough arguments to concentrate all the responsibilities on him. So he went from being considered a genial scientist deserving the gratitude of the humanity, to the role of king of scammers, and JR guided both of these opposite narratives.


    Quote

    And as to your puzzle. One of the few fundamentals of scientific experimentation I remember is that you don't pick and choose the evidence to satisfy your hypothesis, you adapt your hypothesis to fit the evidence. However, you seem to pick your image of what you want to achieve and throw away or ignore the pieces that don't fit. Interesting approach.


    I don't think so. It seems to me that my effort goes in the first direction, but I admit that it is difficult to judge ourselves due to the inevitable bias. If you are so kind to point out a concrete example of my misbehavior, it would help me to better recognize this bias on my side.

    Much of the time, I don't comprehend where Ascoli65 is going with his discussions. But I have to agree with Ascoli65 on the above. Jed Rothwell did indeed write those things which greatly facilitated acceptance of the ecat's legitimacy. But IH staff, advisers and of course Tom Darden himself, have to bear the responsibility for throwing away $11.5 million plus many more millions in legal costs on Rossi. Jed said he did not advise IH directly though of course, they could and probably did read Jed's opinions on the Vortex forum and others.


    In a strange way, Rossi wins because he still has money and condos though he had very large legal bills too. The size of that win, if it was a net win at all, isn't known.

    Quote from seven_of_twenty

    Jed Rothwell did indeed write those things which greatly facilitated acceptance of the ecat's legitimacy.

    I doubt that writing those things facilitated anything. It isn't as if I have an op-ed column in the New York Times. It is possible that the "various professors at the university have been involved for some time" who reported that they "designed and implemented the calorimetry" (Levi et al.) greatly facilitated the ecat-s legitimacy. Based on their first report, I would say they did. Assuming that report was accurate, it should have facilitated the ecat's legitimacy:


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LeviGindication.pdf


    I see nothing wrong with that report. To put it another way, the results are on them, not me. I cannot go around vetting professors at universities. If their papers look plausible and professional -- as this one did -- it isn't up to me to investigate them to find out if they really designed and implemented the calorimetry. Some people have claimed they did not actually design the calorimetry. Rossi did, and they lied. I wouldn't know about that. It sounds improbable. I have no reason to think they did anything wrong, other than refusing to answer questions after Lugano. That's conduct unbecoming of an academic scientist, but it is not a crime, or a scandal. It is bad manners, and it hurts their credibility. Their credibility -- not mine.


    As I have said a thousand times, people should read these papers themselves and reach their own conclusions. Do not depend on me or anyone else to do your homework for you.

    @ seven_of_twenty,

    Quote from seven_of_twenty

    Jed Rothwell did indeed write those things which greatly facilitated acceptance of the ecat's legitimacy.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    It is possible that the "various professors at the university have been involved for some time" who reported that they "designed and implemented the calorimetry" (Levi et al.) greatly facilitated the ecat-s legitimacy. Based on their first report, I would say they did. Assuming that report was accurate, it should have facilitated the ecat's legitimacy:


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LeviGindication.pdf


    I see nothing wrong with that report. To put it another way, the results are on them, not me.


    Here you have a paradigmatic example, the latest of a long series, of how reality is manipulated by mixing facts. The above quotations, concerning the involvement of the professors in the Ecat calorimetry, come from a comment posted on Vortex the day after the Bologna demo carried out on January 14, 2011, whose exceptional calorimetric results, as described in the really *first report* on the Ecat (1), has launched the fame of Rossi and Focardi all over the world as the inventors of the new fire of humanity.


    Bur JR, as he is doing since long (2), continues to present as *first report* the ArXiv document issued more than 2 years later, and which describes the tests on the HotCat performed in Ferrara from December 2012 to March 2013.


    Guess why.


    (1) http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LeviGreportonhe.pdf

    (2) Rossi vs. Darden aftermath discussions

    Quote from woodworker

    My understanding of AA's deadline was June 1, 2019

    What I wrote was that I thought Rossi's estimate of the end of the year was too optimistic. Depending on the size of the factory it would be if he is building from the ground up. If he uses an existing building, with some permits and services installed, the end of the year is possible.


    In answer to a question, today Rossi invited readers of the JONP to attend the presentation, he now expects to be between the end of Dec and Jan 2019. So he is still sounding optimistic.


    Bob was wrong as usual. Rossi was prepared to take government money for a warehouse, but that wasn't on the table.

    Whoever wrote that Rossi has enough money to continue without financial help is wrong too. You fail to consider the cost of the factory and financing the reactors, that are not going to be sold to his customers. He is proposing to just sell heat


    I'm sure small facts like the above will not deter the babblers who will invent some way for Rossi to make money fraudulently.


    RossiSays are not facts

    Quote from Ascoli65

    Here you have a paradigmatic example, the latest of a long series, of how reality is manipulated by mixing facts. The above quotations, concerning the involvement of the professors in the Ecat calorimetry, come from a comment posted on Vortex the day after the Bologna demo carried out on January 14, 2011, whose exceptional calorimetric results, as described in the really *first report* on the Ecat (1),

    Yo! It is the same people. Focardi and Levi were professors at U. Bologna. They looked credible to me. They still do. What do you think I am? A police detective? Omniscient? Where do you think I got the information from this *first report*?


    Did you read the results of January 14, 2011? You should have, and you should darn well have judged them for yourself. I am pleased you read my opinion, but that does not absolve you from the responsibility of reading the results yourself and reaching your own conclusions. I am not the Wizard of Oz.


    There are 4,448 papers in the LENR-CANR.org database, and 4,951 authors. They often announce promising results which later turn out be wrong. That's how science works. In every field, but especially in new science such as cold fusion, or things like cancer research, promising experiments often turn out to be duds. Wrong. Impossible to replicate. You seem to be unaware of that fact, or you are blaming me for that. Grow up! Get real. If you don't like ambiguity, go follow progress in wind turbines.

    Quote from Alan Fletcher

    I am not a lawyer, but (in part due to fogbow, plus a lot of corporate contract stuff) I think that a blog COULD serve a useful legal purpose.


    My understanding is that if you have contemporaneous notes on some subject, when you are being questioned, that you can refer to and read from these notes during a trial ... and that having them gives greater credibility than just recalling from memory.

    So information in the blog, as a set of contemporaneous notes, could be used in a trial. They themselves would not become part of the record, but what the witness said about or read from, would.


    Possibly, but there are a lot of extra hoops to jump through to get it introduced. Let me give you a real life example of when contemporaneous notes/statements might be admissible. Lady says man sexually assaulted her ten years. Man denies and alleges that lady is making up the claim now and never said anything before. Statements, e.g., verbal statements, emails, text messages, etc. that lady sent to friends ten years telling of assault may (I stress may) be admissible, not to prove that the assault happened but to establish that lady's account of assault is not a recent creation. The judge might admit that prior statement for that reason, but might also exclude it on the basis that allowing it in would be unduly prejudicial to the man.


    Almost 30 years, I was talking to a classmate of mine, fifteen minutes before my evidence final (I rarely went to my evidence class - it interfered with my skiing at Tahoe), and I said to her "teach me everything I need to know about evidence in the next fifteen minutes." Jesse Choper, then the Dean of Boalt Hall Law School, was passing by, heard me and said "I can teach you everything you need to know about evidence in 15 seconds." I told him he was on and he said "if its prejudicial value outweighs its probative value, the evidence is inadmissible. If its probative value outweighs its prejudicial value, the court will find a way to let the evidence in." I got High Honors in Evidence.


    The downside, from Rossi's perspective, is that if the court allows him to rely on his blog, notes, etc. to "refresh his recollection", the court would also allow the other side to conduct discovery on all of Rossi's communications, confidential notes, etc. and would allow the other side to introduce all that material at trial and cross examine him on it. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I doubt that any competent counsel would seek to have Rossi's statements on the blog, etc. introduced to support him.


    Please educate us on exactly what was on the table and how do you know. Oh, wait, I got ahead of myself. I am sure that it is all confidential and/or proprietary and that the only information you are ever able to release is such information as puffs up Rossi and his genius.


    You have commented on several occasions asking why Rossi would be pursuing this if it wasn't real (or to that effect). IMHO, it is simple. This is how Rossi makes a living -- scamming and conning people.


    IMHO, the cost of the factory and financing the reactors will be less than the cost of a Snickers Bar, and a lot less filling and worse tasting. I am not including in that any costs associated with building or preparing a Potemkin factory.


    I don't need to invent a way for Rossi to fraudulently make money -- he is doing just fine on that point by himself.

    AA: In answer to a question, today Rossi invited readers of the JONP to attend the presentation, he now expects to be between the end of Dec and Jan 2019. So he is still sounding optimistic.

    Bob was wrong as usual. Rossi was prepared to take government money for a warehouse, but that wasn't on the table.

    Whoever wrote that Rossi has enough money to continue without financial help is wrong too. You fail to consider the cost of the factory and financing the reactors, that are not going to be sold to his customers. He is proposing to just sell heat

    I'm sure small facts like the above will not deter the babblers who will invent some way for Rossi to make money fraudulently.



    THH: RossiSays are not facts


    AA: I suppose you KNOW the real facts? I don't think so.


    Your position here would be stronger (and therefore more entertaining for those of us who like arguing a case) if you provided support for your position.


    For example, in this case I am pointing out that nothing Rossi says can be relied on as fact, particularly because his statements have been so clearly shown to be complete fabrications in the Court discovery testimony.


    You could provide evidence for your strong and unsubstantiated comments here, other than RossiSays.


    Stating that I don't know the real facts is merely stating the obvious. None of us claim to be God and therefore have such all-knowing ability. But I do claim to know some facts, ones that you can look up fro yourself. Some of us are willing to read the Court transcripts and reckon that sworn testimony from all parties there has evidential weight. Not 100% - Rossi could be forswearing himself. Luckily (for the cause of truth) Rossi directly contradicts himself in sworn testimony so the one thing we can be sure about is that he is a liar and since his lies are directly related to his attempt to obtain money from IH that seems strong evidence for at least attempted fraud. He also claims to have fraudulently got out of a contract with a previous investor - though whether his actions there are actually, as he boasts, fraud, is less clear-cut.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    IH seem to have been unique amongst invertors in actually expecting anything Rossi says to have any relationship with the truth. Unwise of them, but they have learnt their lesson.

    THHuxleynew I think Allen was referring to Hydrofusion (because that was the previous potential investor that I believe you were referring to where Rossi fraudulently got out of a contract).


    For new readers, in an email to IH that was made public during discovery of the Rossi vs. IH lawsuit, Rossi boasted to IH that his fraudulent statements to Hydrofusion releasing him from a contract he alleges he had with them was a "masterpiece" (Rossi's words) of deception.


    I haven't heard much from Hydrofusion. Alan, do you have anything you can share as an update?

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