Posts by ZenoOfElea

Quote from JedRothwell

They take up exactly as much space as a central air conditioner, with the fan unit outside. Perhaps there is not enough room for those things in the UK, but space is never a problem in the U.S.

Hi Jed, I would hazard that most people in the UK live in 100 year old terrace houses or 1960s blocks of flats or small council houses.

Even looking at detached houses, usually there is enough of a drive at the side for a car (UK car not a US truck) and a small garden at front and or back.

But yes I don't know how many would be suitable for heat pumps.

I am planning to move in the next few years and my next house I will be looking to have solar panels on the roof battery storage, as that combination seems to make the most sense. We did have have the prolonged British rain punctuated by a heat wave that broke some records. If that is going to become more common then I think I would prefer an air conditioner to a heat pump.

I would be interested to hear what you think about the comment from Sabine, are you more optimistic?

I am getting more pessimistic about green technologies.

I am sure that at some point this century we will no longer use fossil fuels, but the question is whether that is 20 years or 50 years.

We currently have no silver bullet.

Wind, solar, hydrogen, nuclear and current battery storage all have advantages and disadvantages.

But then oil and gas have advantages and disadvantages and have a geopolitical price as the US learned in 1973 and Europe learned in 2022.

Maybe modular nuclear reactors will help, if people don't mind a nuclear reactor in their area!

Maybe space based solar will be great, one day.

So when will our deficient, but improving, green energy technologies become good enough?

On the optimistic side Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted in 2023, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable energy systems are unanimous that it can be done why do we hear daily on twitter and everywhere else by those who don’t study such systems that it can’t be done?

But if that is the case then why is the UK government pushing measures that are then scrapped or deemed failures?

There was the idea of replacing natural gas boilers with hydrogen boilers in homes, yes I know some on here think it is a feasible idea, but nonetheless the government then scrapped this due to "safety and cost concerns".

Then they had the great idea that we should give grants for people to install heat pumps into their homes. From what I have read these can only be installed in houses with enough spare space for the heat pump (so a minority of UK homes) and many have claimed their heat pumps do not sufficiently heat the water.

So is this clown show due to inept politicians, or are the green technologies just not currently up to the job?

On the pessimistic side Sabine Hossenfelder tweeted in December her view;

"Yes, our climate targets will fail because plans to meet them are mostly empty words.

They are slightly slowing down the developments though, so still better than nothing.

Of course we should keep on trying, and of course activists will keep on insisting the impossible is possible and then complain that no one is listening to them.

The reason all this climate talk goes nowhere is that most climate activists misidentify the source of the problem. It's not a technological problem -- we have known how to avoid climate change since we've learned of it. The problem is that we have no system to convert this knowledge into collective action. The only global system that we have to aggregate information and coordinate actions to use resources are free market economies. And for those to work, we'd have had to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Which we did not. So for several decades now we have witnessed meetings and demonstrations and countless opinion pieces that amounted to very little.

It is not hard to predict what is going to happen from here on because the default mode of humans is simply to keep on doing what they've been doing. This is why Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Dioxide Removal (eg BECCS) will become increasingly widespread -- because they'll allow nations to keep on doing what they're doing.

I see in my mentions that some people insist I must be dumb for not understanding that CCS and CDR are costly, ineffective, and unlikely to scale. Well, yes, I am so dumb that I said this in a video two years ago. I am not saying it's a good solution. I'm simply saying it's how it will go because it's the closest we can manage to a market for carbon.

And fossil fuel companies know this full well. And since that is very unlikely to keep global warming below 3 degrees, we'll end up doing stratospheric aerosol injections. Again, a stupid thing to do. I'm not saying we should do it. I am merely saying this is what I think will happen. Why? Because it's cheap and we know how to do it and the more we think about it, the more appealing it will look.

If you want to know what I think we should do, well, I've said this before. Expand solar, wind and most importantly nuclear, CCS on fossil fuel plants, upgrade the electric grids, and stop wasting money on nonsense, like for example those COP meetings…"

I read today, on the BBC;

In January, the Copernicus Climate Change Service is expected to confirm that 2023 was the hottest year globally. The above average temperatures have been likely driven in large part by climate change but also by the natural weather phenomenon El Niño.

It is not known for sure how long the El Niño will last but it is expected it will run through the first half of this year. This will likely also make 2024 the world's hottest on record, and push the world past the key 1.5C warming milestone.

So if we reach 1.5C in 2024 then the Paris Agreement has failed.

I do not agree with the extremist "Doomsters" and have no doubt that we will transition from fossil fuels, just as we transitioned from whale oil and candles.

As usual the richest will do well. The poorest will not do so well.

Of course if LENR comes through then that might be the silver bullet solution.

Here is hoping for good news in 2024.

Thanks Ahlfors, very interesting.

I note that Bob Greenyer, Bruno and some others have become much more negative in their commenting on E-Cat World and Frank does not seem to be blocking negative comments as much. Could this be the beginning of the end?

I was on Ecat-World for a while, years ago, before I woke up, but if you said anything too critical there was a barrage of blowback, or the comment got deleted.

I am not too sympathetic to Frank, he cannot say that he was not warned, and over the years he has been an enabler for Rossi, giving him valuable visibility on the Internet and sucking in more suckers.

“E-Cat SLKep Nevergiveup” LOLLLLLLLLLLLLL

Quote from PhysicsForDummies

There is a new Rossi poll available online, to predict the future of Rossi's quest.

I suspect none of the above.

Rossi has his money and is only still around for the show IMHO.

An easy way out for Rossi, once he gets bored, is to announce that he has discovered that his invention is capable of being made into a weapon of unheard of power and therefore, in conscience, he will stop all production and destroy his research, for the good of mankind.

Scalene; New open source tool dramatically speeds up Python

A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amhers, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow-up, to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages - and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code or higher performance.

Bad signs that LK99 replications are struggling and then Cold Fusion gets mentioned in the same article - kiss of death.

Big Think Ask Ethan Is LK99 The Holy Grail Of Superconductors

Of course if the article I referenced in my previous post above (Explainer thread on LK99) is correct then LK99 replication has a number of complications.

First is the fabrication which many are characterising as "simple". But in fact the fabrication of a successful sample may not be simple.

Quoting from the article I referenced previously;

"The approach outlined in the paper is to very evenly mix your sources of lead and copper, then to bake in an oven at high temperature. This last step provides the energy required to generate high-energy, strained states, but only stochastically.

By using the right molar ratios and crystalizing at high temp you can ensure that the right number of copper atoms replace lead in the unit crystal, but there is no way to ensure with this method that the linear chain of conducting atoms is strictly alternating as required.

Still you will get by chance some regions that have crystalized in the desired configuration. And with the right preparation steps maybe you can get these regions to selectively bind together. Or cleave the sample in such a way as to break it along superconducting lines.

Maybe. This isn't really detailed in either paper, and the L&K have had 20 years of trouble themselves reliably replicating their results. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But this is to be expected as the process is probabilistic by nature."

Second its superconducting properties may only manifest "in a linear chain, so it does not have the blowup of electron states that a 3D crystal structure would have."

If so its properties and measurement would be more subtle than more "standard" superconductors.

Now it may be that LK99 is not a room temperature superconductor, or maybe it is and Nobel Prizes will appear.

But a third option is that we have a novel breakthrough that fails because the "replicators" struggle to see what they expect to see.

Can the Cold Fusion history repeat itself?

Certainly some theorists have suggested that LK99 could work as a superconductor.

But it is the experimentalists that will crown it or kill it.

Brian Wang on NextBigFuture site has been giving a lot of attention to this story.

Lots of articles to read through.

Much of the reaction from the science community is still preliminary.

Some more "eminent" parties seem miffed at the poor physics on show!

Condensed Matter Theory Center at University of Maryland.

""Physics" being presented in these unrefereed preprints is a travesty. The original paper has no obvious SC transition and the T<T_c resistivity is 100 times that of Cu. Southeast also has no transition, just instrumental artifacts. What is the goal here? No one can fool nature"

I suppose science done via ArXiv and Twitter has certain downsides!

However a couple of take-aways that I thought were significant.

First the research on this "superconductor" material has been ongoing for 20 years. This has been mentioned in prior reports but is important to remember against a false impression that media stories can generate, when research news suddenly bursts into the public stage, as if it has happened all of a sudden and without due care. The team certainly have not rushed the publication of their research. In fact the news only broke because one contributor pushed out a paper without agreement.

Secondly, some are saying that even if LK99 does not pan out as a superconductor, or even as a problematic and difficult one, that it looks like it is injecting fresh ideas into the field that may well point towards a successful outcome.

See this article;

Explainer thread on LK99.

If is great fun just to see Shane getting so excited.

It is like one of those YouTube videos watching somebody who is watching a movie.

But we all have our fingers crossed, such landmark advances in science are rare and hard won.

Korea university claim room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor.

Sounds too good to be true but if it pans out then big news!!!

We await confirmation.

Quote from Wyttenbach

In my case it was clear that the mafia (like IH folks) behind USPTO simply wanted to get more information. USA is a 100% mafia controlled state as we have learned during the fake Covid pandemics.

Still don't see how this works.

IH seem to have not managed to get very far, except for some hopeful patents maybe.

As far as government plots and elaborate schemes, in reality governments have great difficulty just functioning at a basic level and getting a group of countries to work together is like herding cats.

The UK government plans for a cleaner future are hardly coherent. We had one government that promoted diesel cars in 2001, that turned out to be a mistake we are now regretting.

The current government has talked up the idea of putting hydrogen into the gas pipe network. Yesterday they finally ditched that plan due to the realization that it is not practicable.

Quote from BEC

I think the ARPA-E money is strictly for academic work to come up with a scientific description of the phenomenon.

A mechanistic description or theory of LENR would be great.

But that is not always the way forward.

I have in mind the matter phase of superconductivity which was discovered in 1911, completely unexpectedly and no theorists predicted this phenomenon.

Some progress was made in 1935 with the London equations but theoretical explanations did not happen till the 1950s with the Ginzburg-Landau theory and the BCS theory.

But the implications of the BCS theory was that superconductivity could not happen at temperatures above 30K.

In 1986 the experimentalists Bednorz and Muller proved that this was not correct.

So in this area the experimentalists have had to forge ahead with the theorists taking years or decades to provide some insight and in some instances the experimenters have had to ignore the theorists.

Today superconductivity is widely utilised and a lot of money is spent on experimental research but we still do not have a complete theoretical understanding of the phenomenon.

So I think LENR funding should not just bet on a theory of the process. We should support the experimenters to improve and validate the results and then the theorists can pick over the data and do their bit. The more data the theorists have the more chance we will get a useful theory.

Not been keeping up on this, and things seem to go quiet for long periods, so pardon my ignorance.

In my view Brillouin are one of the LENR research teams that I am most optimistic about.

So if the ARPA-E grants have not gone to Brillouin then are there some even more promising LENR groups out there?

Or was there some technicality that stopped Brillouin from getting the funds?

Or has the funding all been grabbed by the hot fusion mafia as we feared?

Northwest University Study;

Secondary bacterial pneumonia drove many COVID-19 deaths.

Machine learning finds no evidence of cytokine storm in critically ill patients with COVID-19

Secondary bacterial infection of the lung (pneumonia) was extremely common in patients with COVID-19, affecting almost half the patients who required support from mechanical ventilation. By applying machine learning to medical record data, scientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine have found that secondary bacterial pneumonia that does not resolve was a key driver of death in patients with COVID-19, results published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Bacterial infections may even exceed death rates from the viral infection itself, according to the findings. The scientists also found evidence that COVID-19 does not cause a “cytokine storm,” so often believed to cause death.

The investigators found nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia.

“Those who were cured of their secondary pneumonia were likely to live, while those whose pneumonia did not resolve were more likely to die,” Singer said. “Our data suggested that the mortality related to the virus itself is relatively low, but other things that happen during the ICU stay, like secondary bacterial pneumonia, offset that.”

***

I posted this because I think it is an interesting addition to the "with hindsight" story.

The suggestion is that the cytokine storm, which sounded plausible to me, is not correct.

And again there is another issue of interpretation of statistics.

It is suggested that more people in ICUs died from the secondary pneumonia infection than COVID-19 but they would not have been in the ICU and had ventilation if they did not have COVID-19. So what is counted as the cause of death?

Is it the upstream medical condition or the final medical condition?

Also is ventilation normally this risky as it is used on a daily basis in healthcare?

In any case the whole "rush to ventilation" in the early stages of COVID-19 shows how rapidly our health services default to desperate measures when they have a pandemic to deal with.

I dip into Thunderbolts occasionally, they have some interesting ideas.

Some of the ones I remember reading.

Apparently Venus was ejected from Jupiter in the recent past.

Also the gravitational force was weaker during the time of the dinosaurs which is why they were able to grow so large but could not exist today.

Also the big bang is a false theory, the big bang never happened.

I agree that scientists do form into "camps" and some of the fights for funding and recognition can be brutal, same as anywhere else, and great ideas can be squashed or derailed.

I agree that funding is a precious resource that is not well allocated. There is too much of the pie going to fusion research IMO. Those starting to push for a super expensive super particle accelerator do not have a strong enough case in my view, we need a rethink rather than just throwing ever increasing amounts of money to a subset of physics.

But one thing I would point out to those critical of current science, if the cabal of scientists were trying to hold on to their sacred ideas; big bang, standard model, evolution by natural selection etc then why do they keep doing research that tests their theories with new data? The current "crises" in cosmology has been brewing for a while and the Webb Telescope is about getting new data and pushing the existing theories and models. This is about science gathering data, debating then progressing, not avoiding and stagnating.

So the suggestion is to run two Tesla cars for the test with one being modified to run on SKLeps.

Of course there is absolutely no way that Rossi is going to buy even one Tesla car!

Over the years each test (sorry demo) has gotten cheaper and cheaper.

I guess if somebody drew a graph of the outlay by Rossi over the years then any future demo's will need to be well under $100.

At this rate the next dog and pony show will not be able to afford a pony and will just be a "dog's dinner" (British slang).

Quote from GRMattson

@Of course this whole thing could be a plot to confuse the Russians. There is after all an existential war going on.

Yes, that thought crossed my mind. There have been elaborate plots to release false information.

There was "Operation Mincemeat" in World War 2, but that involved a small group of plotters and a relatively simple plan.

The infamous Cambridge Five spy ring was a small, tight knit group.

When the scheme gets too grandiose you can end up with a Bay of Pigs style fiasco.

Which is why the USA was unable to stop the details of the Manhattan Project from leaking out.

Not only was Klaus Fuchs leaking information from the inside but Russian physicist Georgi Flerov was serving in the Russian air force in 1942 and during some leave he went to the library in Moscow to catch up on physics papers about spontaneous fission. He was surprised to find that there had been no papers published on the topic from top names in the USA or Britain which led him to the conclusion that something important was being hidden.

In this current case though the damage to US credibility is major and the fallout onto the US allies and Ukraine is requiring a major attempt at damage control.

I have only a sketchy idea of what was leaked but have not seen anything that would make it worthwhile.

Even any leaks about Ukrainian counterattack plans will result in the plans being revised.

If you find such things amusing the idea of some fool "leaking intelligence" is a bit disturbing as a metaphor.

But more than one person is in trouble here I imagine.

It would be interesting to know who vetting him to have such clearance.

It would be even more interesting to know, in a secure unit that does not even allow phones for fear of photography, how somebody could so easily smuggle classified documents out of the building. Doh!

This is exactly why I do not believe in clever, sophisticated, deep state conspiracies, the state is neither clever nor sophisticated.

Ged' s post reminds me that we have a vast surplus of foolishness.

If only some genius could figure some way to capitalise on foolishness then anything is possible.

Oh wait ... somebody already convinced some fools that anything is possible.

Years ago I was one of those fools so maybe there is hope for us all.

Edit; Apologies to Jed for spelling his name wrong, I have a drinking buddy called Ged.