Even when I and others show you specifically where you are wrong, you never respond or admit you made a mistake.
I sometimes acknowledge I have made a mistake.
Sometimes - I am just not sure. I stay not sure after your counter-arguments because they rely on assumptions I do not know are true.
My position in these arguments is usually "there is no certainty" yours is "I am sure". So you have a much harder job than I to prove your position.
Let me rephrase: You do not read and then acknowledge things. Even when I and others show you specifically where you are wrong, you never respond or admit you made a mistake. I could dig up the references to control experiments done with electrolysis. For that matter, you could do an experiment yourself. It isn't that difficult. But even if I told you exactly where these references are, I am sure that a week from now you would go back to saying such experiments were never done and would not work. Ditto your absurd claims that a hot object in a cell which melts plastic at 212 deg C does not boil away all the water. I do not think you actually believe that, but evidently you want stupid people here to believe it, because it undermines cold fusion, which is your bête noire. With regard to this subject, you are a political animal who will say or do anything to make cold fusion look bad.
You seem to think that repeating something makes it right. Or perhaps you think that when people read your claims enough times, with no rebuttal from me or anyone else, that means you must be right. I don't know why you do this, but it is tiresome, impolite, counterproductive and a damn nuisance. It is a waste of time writing to you. I am not writing to you, but rather to other readers here, who might fall for your stupid tricks.
Jed, this is repetitive. Let me point out:
Re electrode melting. We all agree that the boiling of the electrolyte is a runaway process in which the last phase occurs rapidly due to the muhc higher applied power at this point (evidenced from F&P paper asymptotic voltage graphs).
None of us can know in these endpoint conditions how good is the thermal isolation of teh electrode or how high the power dissipated inside it due to transient deposits from the boiling electrolyte forming a high-resistivity film.
If you believe you know this may I suggest you are overreaching. If you believe such unusual asymptotic conditions are well understood in the literature this is obviously untrue. The gunk deposited depends on the exact electrolysis done - and anyway who otehr than F&P tests with this "boil to dry under CC conditions with high power source". It is a weird thing to do.
In this case we have not much to go on except pure physics and chemistry speculation (I claim to be your equal or better in that) and others who have done this precise experiment.
The F&P data is not consistent with the video.
You seem to think that repeating something makes it right.
We are both repeating our points. You are not engaging with my arguments - except to say that "the literature makes clear" they are unrealistic. You do not address my counter-argument that the unusual conditions in this experiment are not studied in the literature - indeed could not be without precisely repeating the experiment.
I am engaging with your arguments by pointing out that they do not apply - or that if they do you can easily demonstrate this and so shut me up.
THH
You will not even drop a hot nail into water. You will do NOTHING that calls into question the bullshit you and Ascoli post here.
Many people have pointed out that those old experiments are complex, require skill and money to replicate properly. Since what they do depends on the exact conditions - e.g. the resistivity of the deposits on the electrodes and how thick they are - I would probably not replicate it correctly even if I had this skill and money. So what good would that do?
The google team, or NASA, etc, etc, would be in a position to do this.
THH
Fleischmann described such experiments, as did others. Read the damn literature. Stop asking me to spoon feed it to you. You won't read or acknowledge it even if I do. I have given you fact after fact, carefully sourced, but you have ignored or contradicted every one of them. Stop pretending you will suddenly start to do science instead of idiotic handwaving.
You will not read, and you will not lift a finger to make your case. You will not even drop a hot nail into water. You will do NOTHING that calls into question the bullshit you and Ascoli post here. You will not read anything, test anything, or use one milligram of common sense known to people for the last several thousand years, such as how to make a tea kettle that does not spray drops out, or how to tell when all the water is boiled out of a kettle.
You are wrong about my not reading things. I have read the simplicity paper in detail. You are right that I am slow and do not always correctly understand things. But - I admit it, and in any case I have found that those who are faster and claim to understand things usually have only a partial understanding.
Also, my arguments, when based on ignorance, are easily contradicted. You could show me some other electrolysis experiment that uses a high power CC supply designed to increase cell power by 20X or more as the cell dries out to support your claim that the conditions here are all understood and expected in textbook calorimetry.
It should be pretty obvious that if you need a 200V + PSU for a a constant current source doing electrolysis that normally operates at 5v or so - then conditions will be unusual when the voltage goes up to 200V.
It does not "seem" correct? What is that supposed to mean? You can easily confirm that it was dry by putting a resistance heater into a cell and boiling water with it. Even after the water line falls below the heater, the water will continue to boil (evaporate quickly) until it is all gone.
Jed - that is not the point. And you are conflating two logically separate isues;
(1) was the data from the experiment consistent
Ascoli correctly argues it was not - the graph in the paper and the video are not consistent.
(2) can we argue on some theoretical basis, based on known electrochemistry, that this system set up as specified, generating data as specified (but remember the data is inconsistent with the video - so which do we believe?) must have had HAD?
I think this is unreliable for multiple reasons:
(1) the data is inconsistent - so trusting part of it and ignoring the inconsistency is dangerous
(2) there is a clear possible way in which the cathode, and support, could at the end of this long experiment could become temporarily very hot. That is when the paper notation claims the cell is dry, the video shows it is not dry. The unusual 200V (!) constant current supply is specifically designed to push very large power into the cell and cathode as the cell dries out. this experiment will not be done often because it has unusual components: specifically a 100W DC constant current PSU capable of 200V 0.5A (maybe higher - it is not clear from the paper how high a voltage the supply could go to). To answer Jed's question: during the period the electrolyte boils and therefore maintains close to 100C. The electrode, with large quantities of deposits that have high resistance and dissipate power, gets hotter than the electrolyte.
Comment
Throughout this discussion Jed's analysis makes sense if everything is consistent and as is normal for electrolysis experiements. During teh HAD phase the experiemnt was very muhc not normal. Who would do electrolysis with a constant current source bound to increase power arbitrarily at the moment when the cell is drying out?
(1) it is difficult to make such a high voltage constant current source
(2) the high voltages are a safety risk
(3) to do electrolysis you need constant current for normal operation - maybe up to 10v or even 20v - all easily generated from a standard low voltage constant current supply such as a bench PSU. The actual electrolysis voltage will be < 10v typically (unless you have high resistance electrolyte).
I will accept Jed's view that this is standard known science if he can show me other electrolysis experiments in which high-voltage constant current sources (up to > 200V) are used where the cells are boiled dry and therefore the full range of the supply voltage (and therefore power) is used.
My slow evolution from disinterest to joining ascoli's camp is as follows:
(1) I realised this was a high power CC supply which would push v high powers into the cell as it was drying out and therefore make things like unusual support melting quite possible.
(2) Ascoli convinced me that the data in the appear and the video are clearly, and wildly, inconsistent (time of blue arrows vs time marked in paper as "cell is dry").
Point (2) matters because the time of cell dryness is essential to the important headline claim here of large HAD. Therefore if this is inconsistent it is not a "minor detail" that could be overlooked but the central argument where the data is inconsistent.
Jed's arguments do not address either of these two points.
THH
To be clear on these delicate aspects.
I have never considered F&P incompetent, and I never used the word "fraud", not even with Rossi.
In the case of F&P, I've long pointed out the sloppiness of their papers, as have you. And, more recently, I have used the word "negligence", in relation to the lack of checking of the position of dryness instant in Fig.8 of their Simplicity Paper.
Fair enough. I apologise for misquoting you.
Unless they (Kvit, Flesischmann etc take your pick) merely picked the wrong frame shot (because it was available) when they wrote the paper. To me that is far more credible than suggesting that there was total incompetence or fraud. And ask yourself this, does the cooling curve at the end of the graph look like a Newtonian cooling curve? Seems to me it is not the right shape.
I'm not suggesting, as ascoli does, incompetence or fraud.
I am suggesting unreliable data. As with Mizuno, no-one to my knowledge believes that he is not a sincere honest and creative scientist. It does not mean conclusions about what his reactors are actually doing are correct.
The nature of the HAD data, where there are large nonlinear and irreversible changes in a dynamic system, make it particularly difficult for anyone to check they have got things right.
THH
You are mistaken. The cathode remained hot; the inside of the cell remained hot; the remaining water boiled away. If that had not happened, the Kel-F plug would not have melted. The remaining water was below the hot cathode, but in the enclosed space the cathode heated it enough to boil it away. You can easily confirm this by putting a resistance heater in a cell and . . . I joke! I don't mean it! Of course you will not confirm this!
Of course it did not boil away in calibration runs with electrolysis heat only.
I find all these arguments about the exact construction of the cell, inferring from that what might be, difficult.
However the actual data cannot lie. I am convinced by the relative timing of the video, and the graph in the paper. The claimed point at which the cell was dry does not seem correct.
THH
Thats it..thanks Jed. You know I trudged through all this with Ascoli a few years back. Just because he doesn't stop doesn't make him right.
Alan - I am a new convert to the part of ascoli's evidence where he points out that the claimed cell dry point is inconsistent with the video evidence. Which bit of it do you disagree with?
Really, this HAD claim is not good evidence anyway -0 so it should not matter much - but I do like to have details like this fully argued.
I have not been following the discussion. I suggest you read the papers by F&P. You will see that everything you wrote here is nonsense.
I have some sympathy with you here. It is intricate. But I recommend patience. I also recommend reading stuff before you say it is nonsense?
I am no siding with ascoli over the HAD part of the F&P claims - based on their own evidence.
The temperature drops because much of the heat came from electrolysis. After electrolysis stops, there is only cold fusion heat. The cathode remains hot. The cell does not have have to be completely dry for the power to stop. Power stops when the electrolyte level falls below the cathode. The vapor remaining in the cell cannot conduct a significant amount of power. This is clearly shown in the graphs;
All agreed with you. What is not agreed is when the electrolyte drops below the electrode. In addition it is worth pointing out that the power in increases a lot during this final phase.
Please follow ascoli's argument about the timing of various points on the graphs and the video
F&P had precise records of the voltage in - but they did not record current in as well, so we cannot know when the current drops to zero exactly. However we can be sure that while the voltage is high and increasing the current is still 0.5A.
It is not possible for any measurable amount of power to be dissipated in an 80% dry cell. Calibrations with high powered electrolysis showed that all power stops the moment the liquid falls below the cathode, even though it still covers part of the anode.
Can I ask - as an EE person I know that this depends on how high a voltage the supply can go to. What supply were these calibrations done with, and was that the supply used here? In any case how can we know when the electrolyte no mlonger covers the cathode given that there is so much crud and foam? I believe you are making assumptions. In any case that is not ascoli's main point.
This is clearly described in the papers as you and Ascoli will see . . . No! I kid again!! Of course you will not read the papers. Ascoli would not understand them if he did. You will not, in order to maintain "plausible deniability." For that matter, you will not read middle school textbooks because they show that everything you say about calorimetry and cold fusion are ridiculous violations of elementary physics.
Ascoli (and I - but Ascoli with more detail) has read the papers. Perhaps you would like to comment on the times shown in the papers and how those relate to those in the famous video? This is not about theory - it is about clear contradictions in the data and when that paper claims the cell was dry.
It is easier for you to assume that ascoli and I both are lying, or incompetent, or whatever. Also easier for you to read the paper and not check the evidence.
It should not be a big deal. That HAD claim I never rated - it was flaky. This just proves it.
Display MoreNo, sorry THH. As I've already pointed out to you here above, all those graphs refer to a single experiment: the F&P 4 cells boil-off experiment carried out in April-May 1992. Watch the video (1). This single experiment featured four cells contemporarily. For each cell, two signals were recorded: the voltage across the electrodes and the inner temperature. Each one of the graphs on Figures 6A,B,C,D shows voltage and temperature of a single cell, but the time is the same. For each graph, time axis starts exactly at 0:00 of April 11, 1992.
The caption is correct. The first cell star immediately with current at 0.5 A, the 3 others with current at 0.2 A, which was later increased at 0.5 A at the beginning of days 3, 6 and 9.
If it can be helpful, I have merged the 4 diagrams in the jpeg you find at the bottom of an old comment (2), posted when I started to be interested in the F&P experiments.
Thanks for this.
Generally I defer to you for all details in this matter because you have looked at it with much more attention then me. However until I understand it myself that deference is uninformed and of little value.
OK - I agree - the 2nd of the two blue arrows coincides with the temperature drop, and the claimed cell-dry point is between the two arrows.
That assumes:
(1) the arrowed cell is the one in 6B/8 with the same experiment.
(2) the foam observed on that video can be used to determine cell dryness. I realise maybe F&P, or Krivit, thought it could. Personally I cannot see the water level at all easily.
I'd rather just not make any comments about cell dryness without the power in graph. Power in = 0 => cell dry.
Thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding re 6A,B,C,D.
EDIT - just to be clear. There is no possible way the cell is dry on A. It might be drier - due to foam - but that would just increase the power in due to the constant current supply ans large available voltage to drive it. As resistance goes up so does power in. The time of A is well after the time claimed in 6B. Hence that claim is wrong.
Therefore the story about HAD is based on inaccurate evidence and hence should be ignored. (Ascoli will maybe not want to ignore it but draw other conclusions - I don't know).
JedRothwell - I guess you can follow the argument here. The Krivit video evidence from F&P boil-off experiment shows clearly cell becoming dry around the time at which the temperature drops. Not 3 hours before a F&P paper claims. This is indisputable. You can compare the data above. Key thing - due to the CC drive the cell must be completely dry for power input to stop. The high drive voltage will mean power can be dissipated even in a nearly 100% dry cell.
You can argue:
(1) the boil-off evidence is irrelevant - it is the pre-boil-off heat balance that is the key evidence. I will accept that and move on to that evidence.
(2) the Krivit video that everyone thinks refers to this experiment is in fact some other experiment.
You cannot argue:
This evidence (paper + video) shows strong HAD from the F&P experiment.
I'd be interested in your comments. Rather than say "no - you are wrong" it would be helpful to know which bit of the above argumnent you disagree with - it seems watertight to me.
THH
No I disagree with you because you are so uncertain. Everything is uncertain in the huxster world. I disagree with you because you fail to acknowledge that vitamin d is the key and I have provided the studies all pointing to this, but in your world it's all uncertain. I disagree with ignorant counter productive people like you.
I am happy for you to challenge me about uncertainty.
There are some things pretty certain in physics, maths, even chemistry. Maybe you are not interested in that stuff?
Almost everything in medicine is uncertain because every living being is different and reacts differently to disease and medicine. Also those reactions are so very complex, 100s of metabolic pathways - different for people with different genetics - there is a lot we don't know.
I am sure you realise this - so why the concern about uncertainty?
There are things in medicine you can be 95% certain about. But completely new viruses do not fall into that category.
Nor does vitamin D given the very poor RCT evidence which show all that other evidence is not worth much. I understand - you want to be certain about it. It is your privilege to believe whatever you want and I have no wish nor right to tell you to alter your beliefs.
I suggest you be a bit more polite about mine.
THH
John Cambell: Record excess deaths in Europe and Vaxxed World
Spain +37%, Greece +31%, Switzerland +26%
[Ask yourself "What one medical thing changed in 2021 ?"]
"I have to be very careful with what I say" - can't mention V word
John Campbell - retired Nurse Practitioner with a doctorate in Education - has proved himself a remarkably effective antivaxxer. I think he is actually taken in by this stuff. The problem is, once you go down that rabbit-hole, unless you have the analytic ability and independence to work things out for yourself, it grabs you.
Luckily everyone on this site has all that (though the antivaxxers here suspend it when talking about vaccination).
The key comment above which tells you this is AVD (Anti-Vaxxer-DoubleSpeak) is "What one medical thing changed in 2021 ?"
Of course if you are an antivaxxer your mind leaps to "the whole world got jabbed with poisonous experimental vaccines".
For any neutral person there are (I am here dealing with the UK, but there will be similar lists for other developed countries) very many medically significant things from 2021:
Again, neutral people would look at the detailed stats to try and work out which of these causes are relevant and which not. Just because they could be significant does not mean they are significant. And they would look at other evidence to determine does CPVID vaccination effect these things. That is pretty difficult to do well because vaccination rates vary with vulnerability - the "vulnerable or vaccinated" effect. If you can capture all the ways in which people can be more vulnerable (age most obvious) and do the right statistical analysis you can try to control for it but as we all know it is never perfect and so answering questions like this based on overall mortality figures are difficult.
Still, people (I've not see any detailed analysis from antivaxxers - they tend to ignore confounders) are doing this. Thus far it seems the main effect on UK overall mortality figures comes from increased suicides. That is not the end of the matter, and we will go on getting more info. No-one can rule out some unexpected "vaccine makes you ill" effect. However it is unlikely. Vaccines affect the immune system - which sounds scary when antivaxxers talk about it - and is potentially scary. But all those scary things apply to all vaccines, and they are all things the real scientists are on the lookout for. Thus far, the COVID vaccines seem much better than we expected (we never expected vaccines for diseases like Flu to be great) but also much less good than we would like.
Omicron is difficult - in that it evades both vaccines and prior immunity. Yes - you heard that right. Both vaccines and prior non-omicron infection have a potentially negative effect on some aspects of immune response to omicron. Which makes sense - prior infection and vaccination are pretty similar, and omicron has evolved to try and beat both.
Does that mean vaccination does no good now? No! And the low hospitalisation rates in the UK show that (though as always you need a good deal of number crunching to be sure). That is because there are many different aspects to the immune reposnse to COVID and a clever virus variant that can suppress or even take advantage of some will not beat the others.
So - on balance - are we better off with the vaccines? Certainly we have thus far been better off. As always how long that will remain true is not a simple picture. If the antivaxxers claim it is simple - they are not thinking critically and swallowing their own propaganda.
THH
Hydroxychloroquine blocks SARS-CoV-2 entry into the endocytic pathway in mammalian cell culture
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03841-8
Abstract
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a drug used to treat lupus and malaria, was proposed as a treatment for SARS-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, albeit with controversy. In vitro, HCQ effectively inhibits viral entry, but its use in the clinic has been hampered by conflicting results. A better understanding of HCQ’s mechanism of actions in vitro is needed. Recently, anesthetics were shown to disrupt ordered clusters of monosialotetrahexosylganglioside1 (GM1) lipid. These same lipid clusters recruit the SARS-CoV-2 surface receptor angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) to endocytic lipids, away from phosphatidylinositol 4,5 bisphosphate (PIP2) clusters. Here we employed super-resolution imaging of cultured mammalian cells (VeroE6, A549, H1793, and HEK293T) to show HCQ directly perturbs clustering of ACE2 receptor with both endocytic lipids and PIP2 clusters. In elevated (high) cholesterol, HCQ moves ACE2 nanoscopic distances away from endocytic lipids. In cells with resting (low) cholesterol, ACE2 primarily associates with PIP2 clusters, and HCQ moves ACE2 away from PIP2 clusters—erythromycin has a similar effect. We conclude HCQ inhibits viral entry through two distinct mechanisms in high and low tissue cholesterol and does so prior to inhibiting cathepsin-L. HCQ clinical trials and animal studies will need to account for tissue cholesterol levels when evaluating dosing and efficacy.
This paper quoted by FM1 is interesting, and a great example of how science can be misread.
It shows strong evidence that HCQ is more effective against COVID-19 in cells in vitro with high cholesterol levels, and gives insight into how that efficacy works.
That is very helpful in evaluating when HCQ is more likely to work against COVID, or in increasing the efficacy of HCQ (by adding other drugs).
It says nothing about whether HCQ is actually effective in vivo!
How is it that these lab studies (not just sometimes - usually) - prove to be misleading?
For in vitro results to predict that a drug works you need:
(1) the drug can kill covid faster than covid reproduces
(2) the concentration needed to do that is safe
(3) the drug when administered gets to the right place - so that drug levels are high enough where they are needed.
(4) the in vitro culture correctly mimics what happens in the much more complex human body
All of 1,2,3,4 are needed for in Vitro studies to predict drug performance. 4 is particularly difficult, which is why in vivo studies are a starting point for further work but often do not predict drug performance well.
However, for in vivo studies to predict anything, you need to compare in vitro concentrations that kill the virus with in vivo safe levels.
Any study that does not at least mention whether the levels they use are tolerated by humans should be taken as meaning those levels are in fact not prcatical - or at least not known to be practical.
So this specific study - because it does not answer that key question - says nothing about whether HCQ might be expected to work in humans against COVID.
What actually works is always unknowable due to 4. Maybe in reality it works better, or worse, than expected.
The experience for anti-viral drugs is that it is very difficult to find new effective ones. I guess the human body is already pretty good at dealing with viruses.
Anyway - FM disagrees with me about what works because he reads and posts all these hopeful-sounding studies without checking whether hopeful-sounding is the same as evidence it works.
Since all scientists will hope their work might end up useful, and work that is interesting will get published regardless of is it useful, we get a lot of hopeful-sounding papers.
THH
Yet, just who is producing actual, measurable kilowatts?
Not Mills - unless you define "measurable" in an unusual way!
F&Ps experiments are replicable and they have careful documentation
The only F&P paper you have referred me to does not have careful documentation. For example Figures: 6B, 6C, 6D, 8 are all different experiments, (the time axes are different) yet they are described without mention of this important detail as though they are one experiment. It is not easy to decode them because the graphs are not properly captioned.
Compare that with Lonchampt's similar graphs in his replication - where raw data is presented, carefully labelled.
Display MoreFrom 2015
Speaking of Martin Fleischmann's discovery and what the precise mechanism is that is causing such a valuable effect.
No solid theory.
Think Cold Fusion? Nope
We don't need a complete solid universally accepted theory.
A must read... For studious skeptics.
Sers and the Rise of the Raman Empire
https://www.chemistryworld.com…raman-empire/9264.article
Rough road
After more than four decades of research and more than 12,000 publications on the topic, there is still no complete agreement on what the precise mechanism is...
Compare:
"no complete agreement as to the precise mechanism"
"no even vaguely plausible possible mechanism" (for type 1 LENR).
THHuxleynew , Moved your post here from the LEC replication thread.
Thanks I was trying to do it myself but it is a pain!
I have always felt the flu vaccine useless for the people that need it most and you posted a study that confirms my suspicion on that subject,
That is because you are not reading the literature neutrally. One study does not a Summer make.
The studies all have different issues. You choose to take as definite the one study that agrees with your prejudices, and ignore all the others.
Then - you turn "may be less effective than had been previously thought" into "is not effective" when reading that study.
I prefer to look at them as a whole.
No FM1 says that Covid vaccines suck because efficacy wanes in weeks, cytokine storms, activation of latent bacteria and the onset of Autoimmune disease.
Only one of those points is valid - and then only if you talk about efficacy against infection.
Most people in the UK care about serious disease more than they care about are they infected or not. Maybe the US is different?
