Cold fusion: Manual for the Compleat Idiot

There is a decent video by Jed Rothwell

Unfortunately it repeats some common tropes that can make an approach to understanding cold fusion more difficult (as they did from the beginning). Rather than take this apart, what would be a better introduction? I’m using a recent post by Jed Rothwell as a seed that may create one.

On LENR Forum, Jed Rothwell wrote:

kevmolenr@gmail.com wrote:

So how do we establish that LENR has been replicated? We are surrounded by hyperskeptics, whom I have no real interest in appeasing because their standard, if it were applied to any other branch of science, would send us back to some kind of stone age.

I recommend you ignore the hyperskeptics. I engage with them here only to keep in practices, as an exercise in rhetorical target practice.

Great excuse! Someone is wrong on the internet! There goes countless hours. This is useful if one actually hones literary and rhetorical skills, but, too often, there is no genuine feedback, no objective standard or measure of success. What, indeed, is success? What I’ve gained from the engagement is familiarity with the issues. It enables me to speak cogently, off-the-cuff. We’ll see how effective that is!

We are not, however, “surrounded by hyperskeptics.” Where does Kev live that he thinks this way? Planet Rossi? If someone new is not skeptical about cold fusion, they don’t understand the problem.

I recommend you concentrate instead on trying to persuade open minded people who are sincerely interested in the subject. There are apparently a large number of such people. Although the numbers seem to be dropping off. See:

lenr-canr.org statistics

I’ve been writing for years about this. A goal of “persuading” people can be disempowering. How about “inspiring” them? Short of that, “informing” them. Of what? Our opinions? Continue reading “Cold fusion: Manual for the Compleat Idiot”

How to shoot your credibility in the foot

Simple. Follow Alan Fletcher’s example. He hasn’t done the testing yet, he claims, but when I saw Alan’s announcement of the pool, my immediate reaction was “Ew! WTF?”

Missing in action: self-critique. What could be a problem with this? How could this pool create doubt regarding the work Alan has undertaken?

This obvious lack of self-critique is a prominent feature of the models of Rossi behavior that I use. Rossi seems totally naive about how his work would appear to others. If he is criticized, they are snakes and clowns. A simple desire to verify is full-on grounds for exclusion. Jed Rothwell wanted to bring his own measuring equipment to a demonstration (such as thermometers.) No, visit not allowed. Rothwell at that time was a strong supporter of Rossi. He didn’t take it personally, remained supportive, because he had friends who privately told him they had witnessed impressive tests, and he trusted them.

Fletcher seems to think that nobody could question his honesty. It is not that I’m questioning it, and the most likely source of mistrust would be from Planet Rossi. And I will explain below what I suspect may happen.

Continue reading “How to shoot your credibility in the foot”

Speak of the devil

What ensues when we speak of the devil has long been expected. Problem with the devil: Qur’an: he speaks to you from where you do not recognize him.

I find a gloss for that obvious: he speaks through our friends and most of all through our own internal conversation, which most people have not learned to suspect is a pack of lies, in spite of ancient warnings about the self. (Actually, like the most skilled lies, it is mixed with a kind of truth, which helps it hide more effectively.)

So on LENR Forum, IH Fanboy has been writing a series of posts that continue his Rossi Good IH Bad theme. IHFB is remarkable. Before the trial, he was expecting that IH would unfortunately kick Rossi’s ass because of all the Rossi “mistakes” — or we could just say “lies.” Juries don’t like lies. It’s a simple story to communicate. if there is probative evidence. Continue reading “Speak of the devil”

OMG! Good news!

This LENR Forum development gives me hope for humanity. Arguments have been raging about the alleged flow limitation raised by Pace in his opening arguments on Day 3 of the trial, Rossi v. Darden.

This was based on the Smith Supplemental Report.

Planet Rossi has been loudly claiming that this was the height of stupidity, so bad that when Lukacs pointed it out to Pace and Bell, IH attorneys, before the evidentiary phase of the trial was to begin on Day 4, realized that their entire case was utterly hopeless and laid down and played dead.

Then Rossi went at it hammer and tongs in his Mats Lewan interview. Utter ridiculous stupidity!

There is some discussion of this issue on Pumped Up or Stupid Mistake.

Those folks on LENR forum decided to actually obtain one of these pumps and actually measure the flow rate. What? And give up all the fun of arguing endlessly and firmly proclaiming that the “other side” is not just wrong, but insanely-stupid-wrong and someone-must-be-paying-them?

Apparently, yes. Giving that up, we can hope. So I’m applauding, and commenting on this test idea and implications. Continue reading “OMG! Good news!”

reliability NOT

This is too juicy. On JONP, Leanne or Joanne wrote:

Joanne
June 16, 2017 at 8:32 PM

Dr Andrea Rossi:
Let me inform the readers of the JONP of what is happening in the blog paid by IH ( Lenr Forum): a guy presented himself as an attorney of the USA, expert of litigations like yours with IH. He wrote a lot of stupidities, like you will lose the case because of a lot of issues that still have to be discussed in court. Since no serious attorney would ever discuss publicly about a litigation on course of which he is not part, I asked an attorney my friend if he could check if this guy is really an attorney. My attorney, after one hour, informed me that:
1- in the USA does not exist any person with that name that has ever participated to a case in a court
2- this fake attorney has stolen the identity of a person that never appeared in any court (this is why I prefer not to name him)
3- at the address indicated on Lenr Forum of this “attorney”, there is a post office!
This having been said, since he cites particulars that only the gang of the ventriloquist of Raleigh can know, it is clear that this clownerie has been organized by IH in their home-blog.
Certainly IH must be scratching the bottom of their barrel… The comic aspect of this squalid thing is that a puppet of the ventriloquist -obviously on Lenr Forum- has commented that a NEUTRAL (!!!) attorney, at last, has explained to us the truth about the litigation.
Comments?
Ad majora,
Leanne

 Previously, this JONP user posted as “Leanne,” Leanne Tuffy,” signed as “Joanne” and now as “Leanne,” seems strangely confused as to her name. I assume “her” because the identity is female, though many of Rossi’s apparent socks on LF (which Rossi claims not to read, though he often has responded to comments there … though usually through an obvious sock.)

Andrea Rossi
June 16, 2017 at 9:22 PM

Joanne:
No comment.
By the way, I do not read LENR Forum.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Rossi has commonly referred to LF, as I recall, as “owned by IH.” It is a very strange opinion for those who are familiar with that Forum. If anything, LF is owned by a person sympathetic to the idea of Rossi Reality. The claims by Leanne or Joanne or whoever are strange. I don’t see a real name, nor any address, in the LF commentary on this alleged lawyer. Rends wrote:

It is like painting pictures, Howard Michael Appel, nickname woodworker … https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/user-post-list/2411-woodworker/

…a very experienced lawyer, describes his experiences inside the US law system and gives Rossi et.al no chance at all to win this trial. But, is this really the truth? Maybe, but the Americans have also elected Donald Trump, so we have to see what happened to Rossi. 😉

… a quite ignorant comment, because Trump was not elected in a deliberative process, but a primitive amalgamation, well-known to be vulnerable to massive stupidities by voting system experts. Trump is not the question here, but is this a Forum moderator doxxing woodworker? By the way, if woodworker revealed private data and later deleted it, I would also delete references to it here, unless the public interest in identity becomes overwhelming (which I don’t expect). Mary Yugo outed herself, by an apparently inadvertent post years ago, but that does not make it a wilful revelation of real-life identity. Mary is persistent and sometimes “her” real-life identity is relevant, but I won’t insult Mary by claiming that doxxing is harmless. It can chill discussion.

(Note added: Simon kindly pointed to where Howard gave his name.)

The link Rends provided is only to woodworker’s contributions. It does not establish the name. However, this was in the first post by woodworker that is still up (there could be more, and the profile might have had personal information, removed)

I am a noob to this site (sort of). I spent the last month or so catching up to this point and still have another 12 or so pages to fully catch up. I have held off replying/commenting on posts so far because I thought it best to wait to see if comments I might respond to had already been addressed. But I have to respond to Mr. A. Smith’s comment “Deeply untypical. And whatever happens it will be appealed by one side or the other. That’s when I expect to see rebuttal evidence, not before.”

No disrespect to Mr. Smith, but this is total nonsense. I am not a scientist nor an engineer. I am an attorney who has practiced for over 25 years, including opposing Jones Day (a/k/a Jones Day, Night & Weekends for the amount of billable hours expected of their associates and Jone, Day, Reavis, Pogue & Satan, also by their associates). I started with a “small” firm called O’Melveny & Myers and then spent time with Hughes Hubbard & Reed before going inhouse.

This is not consistent with the LF owned by IH claim. Alan Smith is a moderator, one of the most active. Nor is this friendly to Jones Day, Night, Weekends, Holidays, and the Kitchen Sink.

This is, however, lawyer humor, very recognizable. And woodworker definitely writes like a lawyer, he’s well-informed on law. The claim that a real lawyer would never say these things would be made by a person naive about real lawyers. They say all kinds of things, particularly in private or where they are not legally responsible. Who is this person? Rends has an idea, and does not say where he got the idea, his link is nothing specific. However, Howard Michael Appel is definitely a lawyer. It is possible that there is more than one by that name, most information sites were a bit vague, and the California Bar member listing was down. A California attorney information site had:

Howard Michael Appel
Admitted to Bar 9 June 1992 (25 years ago)
Status Active
Bar Number 158674

Woodworker on Fogbow signed Howard Michael Appel (Ca. State Bar No. 158674).

This establishes high probability of connection. Leanne/Joanne is likely lying, as before. However, what if LF “woodworker” is an imposter? Why would Rends name this person, since woodworker didn’t (on LF)? Or did he? [He did, I just missed it.]

As is common on LF with some users, more attention is paid to conclusions than to fact. It’s true that lawyers will be normally cautious about predicting trial outcomes. This is common with professionals in difficult fields. I asked my urologist what would happen if we didn’t treat my prostate cancer. He said, “I can’t say.” I then said, “You have experience. I am not asking for a definite prediction for my case, but, in general, in your experience, what is likely to happen?” He then told me, and I concluded, with support from published medical literature, to stick with “watchful waiting,” which proved to be an excellent decision, so far. In fact, for a time we thought the cancer had disappeared. In fact, it simply never was large, it was small enough that a second biopsy later missed it, and it shows no sign of rapid growth.

If you want the best advice, you need to know what questions to ask and how to get informed answers, in a situation where doctors are afraid that any incorrect statement can earn them a fat lawsuit.

However, a lawyer with experience can, in fact, predict outcomes with better than chance success, sometimes much better. Woodworker gives legal fact and also his opinions. Those who don’t like his conclusions ignore the facts presented, that’s all too common. His opinions, however, were factually based. That doesn’t create a rigid and certain conclusion, merely something considered likely.

Woodworker is not the Fogbow user who started up a Rossi v. Darden thread, where I have added some comments. In that thread, there is some good reporting and analysis and the usual uninformed knee-jerk reactions whenever cold fusion comes up. And I’m going to visit a real live human, now, I’ll be away from the computer till tomorrow. If all hell breaks loose, save it for tomorrow. (actually I get notification by iphone of comments here, which is now usable since I enabled a good spam filter.)

On desperation, genius, and developmental disorders

Learn something every day. Yesterday, I encountered Miles Mathis, from a post on LENR Forum.

I think Mathis is way cool, for the same reason my daughter, at 14, thought Donald Trump was way cool, or something like that. (And then she actually met Bernie face-to-face). Mathis is definitely thinking and investigating out-of-the-box. This is actually the evolved task of many or most teenagers, and some of us never grow up. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is considered a developmental disorder. It can also be seen as a genetic variation, an adaptation more successful in hunter-gatherer conditions than for a settled, agricultural and centrally structured society. From the post of Eli on LF:

The world desperately needs a new source of energy. (Governments, banks and energy companies, ARE AGAINST).

I already know where this is going from the first sentence. Desperation creates very poor thinking, where the associative power of the cerebral cortex is reduced to supporting the immediate demands of the amygdala, which routinely will confine that vast power to figuring out how to justify the emotional reaction, in this case, a sense of desperation and the wrongness and animosity of “governments, banks, and energy companies.” In other words, the collective; yet there is a paradox here, a different collective that is not organized, it’s fuzzy. Elisha wrote:

We need to unite us, share what we have, and open business opportunities to all!, United we are Strong!

Obviously. We would be strong if united. However, we are already united in some ways, and this unity is manifest through governments and other organizations, but the writer here doesn’t see that; rather he sees and is talking about something else, an unorganized unity. Unity of what? Well, all right-thinking people, of course! People who think like us!

When such a unity does manifest, with sufficient motivation, it can and has created vast social tragedy. I immediately think of China and the Communist revolution there, which replaced the “bad people” — landlords — with “good people,” right-thinking, the “vanguard of the proletariat.” and then which purged all defective elements within itself, and on and on until the society finally vomited and began to actually create synthesis, i.e., what Marx would have predicted, instead of fixing itself in opposition. Or I think of Adolf Hitler, who appealed to the sense of some terrible conspiracy behind every perceived disaster, or, say, Donald Trump. And I am not comparing Trump to Hitler, except to note that both were populists, appealing to what was called the “silent majority.”

On the internet, it becomes easy to find others with whom we will agree, and thus the “social test of reality” becomes possible, putting off the “ultimate test,” allowing us to believe in a reality without substance, merely created by what is called “conspiracy,” in my training. Example of conspiracy: “My wife doesn’t understand me.” Conspiracy: “Yeah, women are like that!”

If science is simple, common, and accessible to all, that they can not suppress it. That is the advantage for the world, but the disadvantage for manufacturers, since anyone can copy it.

Again, I notice the polarization that does not characterize true inspiration with genuine transformative power. This is not Mathis writing, this is Elisha, who has apparently attached himself to Mathis-as-authority, which is ironic. The teenage me didn’t and doesn’t attach to anyone as authority, but … I did actually meet and spend substantial time with Feynman, and what Feynman inspired in me was not belief in his conclusions, but excitement over his approach, and his writing still does that for me.

Mathis is approaching physics, in some ways, like Feynman, but with something else that contaminates his work. It shows in his “polemic.” Feynman loved people, you can see this in, for example, his imitation of Italian, and many other stories. At the same time as he recognized and confronted “institutional stupidity,” he loved the people and maintained a high sense of humor.

The SECRET of LENR is this.

Nickel with monohydrogen, excited with Electrical current in one direction and Magnetic stimulation at Larmor frequency at or below 90 deg.

Aw, hogwash. Sure, there could be some effect, but the conditions described do not apply to the most basic and most confirmed LENR phenomena. First of all, there is, in gas-loaded work, no “electrical current in one direction” and how one would get “magnetic” Larmor frequency stimulation in a conductor (nickel and hydrogen) without induced AC current is beyond me. Larmor frequency stimulation is apparently used in the Letts dual-laser work, involving a teraherz beat frequency, but Letts dual-laser has not been confirmed and is clearly not related to the basic confirmed LENR results — and IH did apparently attempt to confirm Letts, and the Murray deposition implies that they had no success — except that they may have considered low XP findings “only low level,” which is scientifically irrelevant, if the XP correlates with a much lower laser power (as I think it does in Letts’ reports)

Elisha is not standing on science, but wants us to unite in science? What is wrong with this picture?

(Mathis is not responsible for the fawning extension of his idea into LENR.)

The polarization of nuclear spin axes with static magnetic field does not affect nuclear beta “decay” rates, but the addition of a perpendicular high frequency alternating field at the Larmor frequency, does. With maximum stimulation, does not occur exactly at 90deg nuclear spin precession, but at some angles a little below and a little above 90deg ….

This is the source: http://milesmathis.com/main2.pdf

This does not establish any connection with cold fusion. That’s Elisha’s idea. The source is Mathis’ praise of himself, reflecting his assessment of his communications with genuine scientists. Any genuine scientist is likely to appreciate and benefit from out-of-the-box thinking, it can be hard to find. However, that does not translate to “Mathis is right,” though Mathis himself seems to be promoting that idea. And what does he seek?

My new solutions to old problems are being talked about and seriously considered by working physicists. Do you know any other “internet crank” that can say that? I don’t.

Mathis’ ignorance of the range of human experience and behavior is not a proof of anything, it is hardly even evidence. Mathis is obviously an internet crank, which does not mean he is wrong on any particular idea.

If you want the real numbers applied to specific experiments, I guess you will have to hire me.

And someone might, and that will not prove anything other than possible curiosity and willingness to invest some resources in investigation (money or time). However, seeing this has the effect on me of suppressing interest in his ideas about physics. Caring about being paid is not what I’m accustomed to seeing from the real vanguard; rather, that arises with frauds and a certain kind of self-obsessed crank.

Our own joshg (Josh Guetzkow) wrote an article on “Mathisian physics.”

What will the advent of cold fusion mean for establishment physicists? Will they be able to bend over backwards with ad hoc band-aids to patch up the same theories that keep telling us cold fusion is “impossible?” Or will it require a massive overhaul of our understanding of the physical universe? In that case, we will need a new paradigm and new theories to rebuild it from the ground up. As it happens, someone already has rebuilt physics from the ground up. His name is Miles Mathis, an independent, self-taught polymath. I believe his revolutionary theories hold the key to a comprehensive explanation of all LENR processes, and I am writing this to explain why.

In the “believer community,” which overlaps the “cold fusion community” and the “CMNS community,” there is a concept that is shared with the “skeptical community,” they actually agree on it — and it is, rather obviously, false, and has been known to be false, by the best scientists, since 1989. This idea is that “known theory” somehow proves that “cold fusion” — what’s that? — is “impossible.” We see this idea over and over in Huizenga (1992 and 1993), and it is clearest in his second edition. Huizenga clear has a concept of what process must be occurring if “cold fusion is real.” Yet the actual claim, from the first FP paper, is of an “unknown nuclear reaction.” The analysis that Huizenga applies is to, not an unknown reaction, but a known reaction, or some alternative known reactions, such as d+d -> 4He, the direct and simple fusion by overcoming the Coulomb barrier between two deuterons.

Looking at the Miles results on the heat/helium correlation, he says, in the second edition that this result is amazing, and, if confirmed, would solve a major mystery of cold fusion (i.e., the ash, which was unknown until then, with only a few speculations that it might be helium). Then he says that he expects it will not be confirmed, “because no gammas.” The conversion of deuterium to helium almost certainly requires a high-energy gamma, known to be produced when this conversion occurs as a rare branch of normal hot fusion. The gamma appears to be required by conservation of momentum; but that is only true under two conditions: first, that this is the specific reaction, for if some unexpected catalysis allows, as an example, the fusion of four deuterium atoms to form one 8Be atom, this would generate no high energy gamma (which is what Huizenga expects, low energy photons, if nuclear in origin, are called “gammas” but those are not known to be missing, and would be difficult to detect, leading us to the second condition: that there are no halo states capable of storing the energy for what may only require something in the femtosecond range.

The point is not that multibody fusion is the explanation, but that the impossibility argument fails, as it must, and as was well-known in 1989, being well expressed by Schwinger and others.

What we call “cold fusion” is an “unknown reaction,” now known by a preponderance of the evidence, with very little contrary evidence, to be the conversion of deuterium to helium with no other major persistent products other than heat. (So tritium and transmutation evidence, which may relate to rare branches and secondary effects, can confuse).

There is no violation of “existing physics,” in this, other than the general idea, easily in error — and in error many times in the history of science — that if an “unknown reaction” possibility existed, it would have been observed. In fact, such phenomena are observed, often, but the observations can be missed because they are unexpected. There is a great example of this in Mizuno’s book, a major PdD heat event, before the Pons and Fleischmann announcement, that he passed over as one of those unexplained things that will never be understood.

Was that LENR? From his description, probably.

To examine the vast body of work by Mathis would be tedious. I watched two videos of his on the “Pi = 4” trope. He is crazy, that’s really obvious. That isn’t coming from a belief that pi is not 4, but rather from his redefinition of pi. Pi is used in certain calculations, and may then generate some incorrect results if the calculations do not take into account all relevant conditions. Mathis’ demonstration is blatantly flawed, which is covered over with poor explanation; essentially he assumes that two ball bearings with the same initial velocity, rolling in two tubes on a flat surface, will continue to move with the same velocity, when one tube is straight while the other is curved into a circle. What he finds, summed up, is that the ball bearing in the circular path takes longer than that in the straight path. This is utterly unsurprising and the unstated assumption underneath his argument is obvious: that the ball bearings will move with the same velocity in each case. What he does is only to show that the circular motion slows the ball bearing, as it must, from some simple physical arguments. But he assumes constant velocity to “measure” distance travelled. This is so obvious that I wonder about Mathis’ sincerity.

His explanation of the circularity of a rainbow is more interesting, and less easily punctured. His presentation of rainbows as being images of the Sun is interesting and supported by photographs. It is entirely possible to find long-standing explanations of things that are unreal. If anyone might do this, it could be Mathis. He’s smart, he actually is a polymath, but his conclusions, his personal attachments to being right, if he has them, as appears, are no more likely to generate wisdom than what he’s rejecting.

Feynman did what he did, often, by examining problems ab initio, not looking first for explanations from others. Doing so, he invented new approaches, he found things that had been overlooked. But he did not fix on himself always being right, and warned about attachment to being right. Mathis, if he could recognize his personal psychology as being rooted in a developmental “disorder,” — a misleading characterization for a possibly genetic variation that is called a developmental disorder because it can be disabling in some ways, but that also creates an ability to do things that “normies” don’t seem to be able to do — might be able to make far more progress, and might be far more useful for the development of science as a social phenomenon.

Ratwiki — as it is affectionately known — has an article on Mathis.

Rational wiki is a site dominated by pseudoskeptics, originally organized to ridicule Conservapedia.

Ratwiki is dominated by adolescent psychology, polemic, and the kind of pseudoskepticism, “scientism,” found among, say, “modern atheists” and those who came to dominate CSICOP, the “debunkers,” highly sarcastic and supremely sure of self. One will not find articles there that are overall, “objective,” and “rational.” They are having fun, ridiculing others. That’s the goal, not objectively and neutrality, which they strongly dislike.

I have admin privileges there, which is completely useless except it will allow me to read deleted content. They grant those privileges to almost anyone that any administrator likes in any way, and any admin can grant or remove admin privileges. It’s a formula for vast waste of time, if anyone is interested in confronting the “community point of view.” Been there, done that! Mostly, what I found useful there was in seeing how certain prominent Wikipedians actually thought, what they actually believed, which was much more visible there than on Wikipedia, where they would pretend to be neutral.

I just checked, I still have the sysop privilege, I could still waste my time at great length. Once in a while, I make an edit there. I haven’t in three years.

In any case, joshg ignores the Pi fiasco. His idea is that Miles may make some mistakes, but that his “physics” may contain the clues to LENR reality that the world needs. Joshg is free to discuss this here, but …. this isn’t what the CMNS community needs, to be associated with the radical fringe. It needs the opposite: it needs synthesis, integration, genuine and effective communication. If you believe that an entire community is wrong, you will be, almost certainly, unable to communicate with them. Effective communication requires understanding and sympathy, and that is why this blog welcomes genuine skeptics. Skepticism is rational, to a point. As is pointed out on Ratwiki, “Rational wiki is not rational.” It is almost a parody of itself (that’s the best thing about it.)

I just now went to Mathis’ mathematical “proof” that Pi=4. Proofs like this are familiar to anyone with substantial math experience, I was looking at these before I was a teenager. If anyone is tempted to accept this argument, comment and I’ll look at it and explain it in more detail, but the flaw is completely obvious, and that Mathis still defends it speaks worlds about his psychology, if he isn’t just pulling our chain.

Mathis assumes that a zig-zag path, with an obvious and stable path length, independent of step size, equal to the sum of the two directions, will approach the path length along the circle. In fact, the nifty videos linked below avoid something obvious: if you lay out the circular tubing along the straight tubing, it will not extend to four diameters, but to pi diameters. That is the ordinary meaning of path length along a circle. How much tubing is needed to create a circle with diameter D? Not 4 D, for sure.

This is pure confusion and fog, and Elisha apparently believes it. Zephir_AWT pointed to the Pi confusion, with photos he believed to be Mathis. He wrote:

Miles Mathis suffers with macromanic inventory delusions. He thinks Pi equals 4.0 and other crazy stuffs. This is what disease does with talented people.

The first source is a video by DraftScience, who is implied to be Mathis. (In fact, DraftScience is a critic of Mathis.) The second source does not explain “macromaniac inventory delusions,” whatever they are, but is simply the RatWiki article. The third link is to an article by Miles Mathis on Stephen Hawking being an imposter, fake, (and the original deeper source would be on milesmathis.com.) The last link is to Mathis’ art from google images, and that points to a mathis art page where one can find, for example, a bio of Mathis with photos.

Elisha was unfazed:

First, What is your contribution ?, since emotional critiques serve to entertain us, but they do not serve to advance in science.

There are relatively objective critiques on or linked from the RatWiki page.

Second, this man in not miles mathis. He is a follower of him.

Miles Mathis can be seen at the RatWiki article, taken from a book cover. This image is claimed to be roughly 17 years old. The image on LF is recent. Mathis writes this about the “man”:

ANNOUNCEMENT, added 8/25/16, some of my readers have been confused by a guy on youtube with a channel called DraftScience. They think that is me. It isn’t. He links to me and discusses my stuff a lot, apparently, although I haven’t watched more than a couple of minutes. I don’t know him, have never talked to him, and have no links to him. Although there is some resemblance, since he is about my age and blond, that is about it. His hair is much longer and less curly, he doesn’t sport a goatee, and he smokes. I don’t.

Here is Mathis’ “extended biography,” and it includes more photos of him. Unless these are fake — hey, if Stephen Hawing is fake, why not Miles Mathis? — Mathis is right, and so is Elisha, on this point. However, being right on one point doesn’t rub off on other points, even though the opposite, being spectacularly wrong on a point, and persistently so, does color everything.

Third, there is a experiment that confirm that pi is 3.14 and 4 this depend of the use case.

Now, first of all, we see these sweaty claims, frequently, and often from people whose English is extremely poor. What does the command of English have to do with one’s cogency? In theory, not at all, but in practice, poor English is associated with lack of care and caution, lack of concern for accuracy, lack of clear thinking, all that. When it is combined with arrogance, it’s ugly.

Elisha points to a video of the “experiment,” which does not do what it purports to do; rather it gives a result that will confuse those who make a basic unstated — and incorrect — assumption, that if a ball rolls with a particular velocity in a level straight path, it will roll with the same velocity in a circular path. That assumption would not, by itself, generate “pi = 4,” but no analysis is given of how linear momentum is converted to angular momentum, but it’s quite clear that converting the motion to circular would slow the ball, yet for the video to make any sense at all, the ball velocity must remain the same, since distance is being measured (marked off) by time.

This is not “skepticism,” it is straightforward and clear analysis, easily done by a careful child. The discussions on that video are appalling.

DraftScience comments on the proof video, imagining that the difference in velocity is due to friction. At least he understands that the velocity is different, but I doubt that the difference is from friction, even though friction would also slow the ball. His argument is incorrect, so if one understands it, that’s a clue one is confused.  Joshg shows up commenting there.

Listening further, DraftScience does recognize that the friction argument is missing something: bottom line, he’s “explaining” off the top of his head, a video blogger, and in this is like many bloggers who just blabber on without developing coherence. Further, DraftScience is not a “follower” of Mathis. Quite the opposite. So this whole conversation was bonkers. Rather, DraftScience realizes, at least in some ways, the error. However, he does not address the math, AFAIK.

The original math summary, again. RatWiki points to an allegedly clear exposition. It’s not wrong. The writer’s frustration is apparent. This is not coming from “belief in the mainstream” or any other such nonsense. It is coming from grounded common sense, easily verified experimentally. Mathis redefines words to confuse himself and/or readers. Instead of the “circumference of a circle” being a distance — representing, in practical terms, how much material one would need to build the circle, how much ink it would take to draw it using a compass, etc., like ordinary distance, it becomes a vastly complicated entity. Reality, ordinary reality, is much less complex than Mathis’ world, and that is why children can understand it. I derived most of this stuff as a child, I disliked memorizing formulae and wanted to understand directly.

Mathis creates a fractal, as pointed out, and then assumes that the length of a fractal is the same as the length of a curve that it seems to approach. However, fractals are imaginary structures that can have unlimited length in a confined space, and it would not be difficult to show this, by defining a structure (line) that zig-zags within that space which can be as small as one likes (i.e, as close as one likes to a defined curve).

This is diagnostic of Mathis’ delusions, and shows how dangerous belief in one’s own superior rightness can be. Again, that doesn’t mean that one is wrong, and I would never recommend that people give up what they think is correct, just because others disagree. Rather, what I recommend is an attempt to understand why they disagree, what’s the basis? For a nice little study of a kid who didn’t give up when ridiculed, I posted this early on: The Mpemba effect and cold fusion

Okay, I kept looking a little before publishing this, and found an actual child who demolished Mathis. Well, is an apparent high-school girl a “child”? Maybe not. Nevertheless, here it is: accurate, simple, easy to understand, and devastating.

Another video from her. Now, this young woman is going to change the planet. Or at least will continue to have fun, which, in the end, may be far more useful than being a sweaty, convinced he is right, “polymath.”

And another about Pythagoras. I’m in awe. There is hope for the planet, because she is the future.

Unspecified “they” is always a figment of our imagination

T is for Them :: U is for Us

Joshg is one of the most coherent writers identifiable as Planet Rossi.

On LENR Forum, he wrote:

JedRothwell wrote:

I had high hopes that I.H. would fund research. I think they would have, but they have been derailed by the lawsuit. They fired the technical staff. They may be funding a few studies, but I doubt they will contribute significant amounts of money.

So that R&D center they opened up near Raleigh headed by Antonio La Gatta is just a figment of our imagination?

This is common on Planet Rossi: “they” is fuzzy and amorphous. Genuine questions:

  • Is there an “R&D center” opened “near Raleigh”?
  • If so, who opened it?
  • What does this have to do with Industrial Heat and their plans?

First of all, see this LENR Forum report, posted by Alain Coetmeur, in May, 2016. The company in question is HMRI R&D, Inc. The Registered Agent is Paul T. Winter, very likely this CPA. This is largely meaningless, CPAs often serve as registered agents with very little involvement in the actual business. The business office shown is 13000 Weston Parkway, Cary, NC 27513, which appears to be a 57,000 sq. foot office building, that was for sale and for lease in 2015. Other companies have the same address, so HMRI — or their accountant — may only have a small — or larger — office.

The creation filing, August 12, 2015, shows an “incorporator,” who is merely an attorney, Byron B. Kirkland with a Raleigh address, and then two initial Directors: Antonio La Gatta and John T. Vaughn, with the same address shown as is shown for the Registered Agent. These are the persons of interest.

Antonio La Gatta. La Gatta was working with R&D at TSEM, a sponsor of ICCF-19 in Padua in 2015. His sister is a manager of that company. She told the interviewer this, in May, 2015: “my brother Antonio will travel to the US to direct the new US operational units in Texas, in collaboration with MIT, Texas Tech University, Indusrial Heat [sic].”

This was a plan in May. While there may be a correct substance to it, it’s a confused rumor. “Collaboration” with MIT is meaningless. MIT is not involved with LENR. Peter Hagelstein, a professor of electrical engineering there, is. “Operational units” of what? TSEM? Perhaps HMRI is a “unit” of TSEM? As to Texas Tech, again, this would likely be a reference to the Duncan et al group there, which was announced at ICCF-19.

While a connection between Texas Tech and HMRI is certainly not impossible — they were looking for additional labs to work on the heat/helium project, beyond themselves and ENEA (Violante) in Italy — I have no information about such a connection. Industrial Heat is not connected to the Texas Tech project, which was independently funded.

However, Vaughn is an initial director. This is JT Vaughn, an officer of and investor in Industrial Heat — and a defendant in Rossi v. Darden. This news, however, does not establish that Industrial Heat “opened up a research center near Raleigh.” Cary is indeed close to Raleigh, about twelve miles. What is HMRI R&D up to?

There is some information in the Murray deposition, for which we have the full transcript. IH had a research operation, investigating various LENR approaches, and Murray reports on some of that. He testifies:

·1· · · · Q.· · Of all the systems you tested in Industrial
·2· ·Heat, were there any that you were able to validate and
·3· ·verify?
·4· · · · A.· · No.

This is thoroughly discouraging, for many. However, this, or most of this, may have been seeking to find a way for Plan A: rapid commercialization. Plan B was my name for retrenching, going back to the most basic science and nailing it. For Plan B, small results can still be very significant, even more so of the “small results” show correlations. Heat/helium is the quintessential Plan B project, because there are many supporting reports, and the vast bulk of the evidence confirms the correlation first reported by Miles in 1991. This has practically nothing to do with NiH research, which, if NiH effects are real and not artifact, would surely have some different ash. Murray goes on:

15· ·[…] And in many cases the heat that they were
16· ·producing, the excess heat, the anomalous heat was very
17· ·small.· They, they had amounts that were very small.
18· ·And so any small errors in their sensor systems or small
19· ·errors in their assumptions would mask that level.
20· · · · · · · So we went through and carefully analyzed
21· ·their data, and in a few cases we actually reproduced
22· ·their experiments.· We had two groups that in the
23· ·validation verification phase we came up with what I
24· ·would describe as nebulous results.· They weren’t
25· ·positive, but we certainly just couldn’t say here is a
·1· ·major problem that has to be overcome before we could
·2· ·legitimately verify and validate it.· And so in those
·3· ·cases we worked very closely with the inventors and
·4· ·organizations to help them do independent reproduction
·5· ·in our lab.
·6· · · · Q.· · Okay.· And those were successful
·7· ·reproductions?
·8· · · · A.· · No.· Ultimately, the reproductions, yeah, we
·9· ·didn’t find anything that had excess or anomalous heat.
[…]
15· · · · A.· · The first one was Dr. Mizuno in Japan.· That
16· ·was a plasma-based system.· And the second one, which
17· ·was very much at arms length, I did not have privy or
18· ·access to this one, was HMRI.· It was a, it was only a
19· ·partial investment into it.· And so I was kind of, me
20· ·and the rest of the engineering team were kept at arms
21· ·length.· We weren’t allowed to have access to all of
22· ·their data, so I just got summary reports and briefings
23· ·on some of the things they had done.
24· · · · Q.· · I thought you were able to reproduce their
25· ·experiments in your lab.
·1· · · · A.· · So, yeah.· No, we, what we did was, based on
·2· ·the limited knowledge we had of their system, we
·3· ·reproduced an electrolytic cell that to the best of our
·4· ·ability looked like what we had understood they were
·5· ·doing.· And we could not achieve the same results that
·6· ·they were giving us at this kind of arms length.

There is a little more description of the HMRI relationship:

25· […] Likewise with HMRI, the way the contract was
·1· ·structured, we were kind of at arms length, so we only
·2· ·got a little bit of information, and the information we
·3· ·were able to receive, we structured some experiments to
·4· ·understand it.· That was actually very late.· That was
·5· ·probably June of 2016.

There is more about HMRI, some misc findings, on Misc Mash. There is an indication that I could not confirm that an HMRI “proprietary process” was being “moved overseas.”

Back to Joshg’s claim, essentially that “IH” established HMRI “near Raleigh.” From what we have, HMRI is independent and the collaboration expected (from La Gatta’s sister) was arms-length, and limited. While there was likely some IH investment in HMRI, it was limited and it cannot be reasonably said that this Cary lab shows IH’s continued commitment to LENR research.

On Planet Rossi, though, extremely limited information is interpreted and extended and reports as fact, and then others repeat it and it becomes “well-known,” like the alleged $200 million investment by the Chinese, and then the question becomes “where did that money go,” rather than the question that would reasonably precede it, did it exist at all?

A brilliant example of all this arose on LENR Forum, it’s mentioned on the Misc Mash page.  March 2, 2016, David Nygren wrote:

Now we need to dig deeper! It is valued to over 1bn dollars?

IH HOLDINGS INTERNATIONAL LIMITED
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09553031/filing-history

This is not my field so please help. For you who are good at counting, do these tasks!
23M shares * $ 45 = weather over $ 1bn??

Here we have 20 companies listed (59 page / 8 Jun 2015)
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09553031/filing-history/MzEyMzczNDg0OGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0

Indeed, not his field. However, he does not show where the $45 came from. He links a listing of companies on a signature page for an authorization to issue Series A shares, i.e., ordinary shares, valued at $0.01 each, some for cash and some for other consideration. The total value to be alloted, I read as $11,098.78 plus $25.907.15, total $37,005.93. A tad short of $1 billion, eh?

Barty asked David what this meant. The blind leading the blind.

AlainCo provided some correct information (the $50 million investment by Woodford a few days later), but did not actually correct the Nygren error. AlainCo noted the use of different classes of shares that can allow company founders to retain control even when receiving a large investment. AlainCo’s other post on this, Mar 3, was much better but still confusing and inaccurate.

June 30, 2016, I came across the discussion, researched it, and corrected it, giving sources for everything. The Woodford investment has been incorrectly reported by news sources that apparently did not look at the original documents. Woodford invested exactly $50 million US. To be precise, Series A shares (not the original Series A, apparently, later called “ordinary shares”) were preferred shares, issued at $45.049996 per share, and two Woodford trusts bought 1,109,878 shares, which works out to $49,999,999.50. My guess is that they actually paid $50 million, so inquiring minds want to know where the extra fifty cents went.

sifferkoll immediately exploded:

are you playing stupid again Abd? I said $1bn valuation, which roughly means Woodford bought 5% of IH with $50M.

Later, I remembered the $1 billion error was sifferkoll’s, probably because of this post. My guess is that Siffer had written this on his blog — I’m not researching that now — and that Nygren had picked it up from there. Maybe. What Siffer is showing is a total lack of understanding as to how a company is valued, and what that means. Had Woodford purchased ordinary stock for $45 per share, this would have made some sense, though it would still not have created a billion dollars for Darden to somehow “disappear.” But Woodford did not do that.

My point here is that LENR Forum and those who write for it have no habit of correcting errors. We can see people coming up with false information years later, because they read it in a post, perhaps, in this case, a post by the Founder of LENR Forum. There is a reservoir of held ideas about IH and this case, based on what was stated back then based on assumptions from shallow research. “Toilet paper stock,” mentioned by Sifferkoll, is a common idea. “Shell corporations.” (But the only genuine shell corporation here is JM Products, Inc.)

Siffer wrote “Darden simply pocketed the money and made it dissappear [sic].” But what money? A billion dollars? In fact, Woodford invested $50 million and, while IH Holdings International doesn’t broadcast much detail, much of the money still exists, as cash or other holdings of IHHI (including some valuation for the Rossi License). Siffer has in mind a billion dollars that he made up, that never existed. And then there is the alleged $200 million from the Chinese, that apparently also never existed, or if it existed, it had little or nothing to do with Industrial Heat, it was Chinese money, invested in a Chinese project with very little connection with LENR, if any.

More on the investment flabber

On LENR Forum, Eric Walker mentioned a post by joshg. While the link was incorrect, I did some searching for joshg (LF), and Josh G (ECW). I found comments I had overlooked.

joshg, himself, overlooks timing. It’s easy to do this when one is defending a thesis, looking for proof. One will come across some evidence that seems to prove the thesis, but events have been collapsed, and what happened later, in fact, can be asserted as a cause of what happened earlier.

4/21/2017, joshg wrote 

I have frequently been challenged to substantiate my claim that Darden et al. basically defrauded investors by using the 1MW test to raise $50 million from Woodford (plus some kind of joint research endeavor with the Chinese plus who knows what else).

Josh is not promoting the $200 or $121 million Chinese investment in IH meme. However, was the 1 MW test “used” to raise the $50 million?

Continue reading “More on the investment flabber”

The Troll’s Playbook

The Secret Playbook of Internet Trolls. ‘Disrupt, Misdirect and Control Internet Discussions’

It’s ironic — or is it? — that Planet Rossi routinely accuses the “Ventriloquist of Raleigh” of spreading FUD, of paying people to attack Rossi. At the same time, IH Fanboy claims that those who claim others are lying are likely to be liars themselves. Many are eager to find fault with others, to toss any garbage they can find or invent, and this does happen on all “sides,” — but Planet Rossi is organized around Rossi Thought, as expressed for years on his blog, JONP.

A common troll tactic is having a series of Favorite Topics, arguments, sometimes based on something resembling a fact or which can be claimed to be fact, that are then raised to avoid discussing something else, such as any losing issue. Ele did that with the claim that IH had raised $250 million (as if this proved Rossi Reality, if it were true) and I covered it on

… and that second post goes into some detail on origins of the “$250 million” story.

Eric Walker, on LENR Forum, confronted ele over this (as previously mentioned). ele came back:

ele wrote:

Cite and quote the court document that has this number and I’ll move your post back to the Rossi v. Darden thread. Eric

Ele normally does not provide accurate citations, has no academic habits (which is like Rossi, who has not worked in academia for a very long time). What ele quotes here was not written by ele, but was a comment added by Eric Walker when he moved the off-topic comment to the Playground. Before going on with the ele response, here was that original ele post, what Walker moved:

oldguy wrote:

250M exists only in “Rossi says”.

No. is written in the documents of the trial. This figure was cited many times here and no one from IH have never negated it.

Darden’s visits to Doral with investors are alo [sic] documented.

Cite and quote the court document that has this number and I’ll move your post back to the Rossi v. Darden thread. Eric

I’ve looked and have not been able to find one. But there are thousands of documents and some of them have hundreds of pages. However, I have found what appears to be the original claims. It was very likely Rossi Says.

ele responds with what does not address Eric’s challenge. He claimed a court document, that’s what Eric dinged him for, not for the $250 million itself. He then provided some “evidence” for large numbers, but not $250 million. Not the court document number that anyone can check.

Basic troll rule: make claims difficult to verify. Waste the time of those who might disagree with you, burn them out with repetition. This is not mere disagreement, people may disagree and then collaborate in finding reality. Trolls are about provoking upset, which can include irritating others through repetitive, unresponsive claims. While insulting them as having nothing, as ele did in this sequence, even though those others were simply stating what is obvious from court documents and community discussions.

I would assume that Eric would want to see the original post edited to make it potentially useful. Not another post adding “more evidence,” never checking or confirming the original claim.

This is like the repeated claims of Dirt in Cherokee history. These claims have been tracked down and analyzed many times, there is very, very little there, essentially nothing surprising for a company that works as Cherokee works — which is legal. Evidence is cited that, if one actually follows it (most people don’t follow evidence, take the time to read court documents, etc), shows Cherokee as a victim of fraud, not a perpetrator of it. But the fraud was an officer in a Cherokee company! So it looks bad. This would be like condemning Cherokee for fraud because they engaged with Rossi. In fact, the trolls do that. They should have known better, and, obviously, they only wanted to impress investors to extract money from their pockets. Yet the documents don’t show that, not at all. IH only dealt with investors who knew and were willing to assume the risk. Woodford has a different class of investors, to be sure, but Woodford has only a small percentage of those funds invested in LENR, through IHHI, not IH, and, while Rossi’s alleged technology is part of the full IHHI portfolio, the Woodford money didn’t go there, which probably pissed him off no end.

IH did visit Doral with investors and others. However, we know from the Ampenergo memo that Woodford, in particular, was not terribly impressed, at least according to Vaughn, speaking privately with Ampenergo well before the Doral test was over, and with no reason to lie to him. The timing of investments and the documents we have on them do not support the Rossi claim that investors tossed in funds based on being impressed by Doral. Definitely not Woodford, that investment was planned before Doral started up. Another visitor was Pike, who may have Chinese connections, but Pike was already an investor (a fairly large one).

ele went on:

Dear Eric,
The big amount of money raised from Darden is also a public information.
Just as an example please have a look to this page: Donbot.com

It is rather easy to notice that this is not a court document. It is rather easy to notice that the page doesn’t source most of the information. However, it was taken without credit from another page that does give more sources, on Hydrofusion.com, the web site of Rossi’s licensee for a few countries.

One of the sources is a Huffington post article, Interview With Andrea Rossi, LENR Energy Pioneer, October 6. 2015. Full of errors — and Rossi lies, including Stuff and Nonsense about the “customer,” the monitoring systems in Doral, etc.

Quote
WIM, or Woodford Investment Management, had said earlier in the year that they had invested in Industrial Heat. At the
beginning of October, they revealed that they had performed due diligence for 2.5 years, and their investment came to $50
million USD. [….]

While this is not precisely correct, it’s true in round outline. Woodford did not invest in IH. They invested in IHHI, which bought all outstanding IH stock, exchanging it for IHHI stock. Woodford received “preferred stock,” which doesn’t give operational control (Woodford doesn’t have voting power commensurate with the value of their investment) but which does have certain other special rights. It is reasonable to claim that Darden raised this funding; Woodford apparently trusts Darden. This money, however, did not come because of the visit by Woodford reps to Doral. There were actually two visits, one very early in the “test,” and the other after relations had actually broken down, after Rossi refused to allow the IH engineer, Murray, to visit the Plant. Woodford did not invest because of these visits; they were apparently not impressed. A plant with a steam outlet running through a wall into an inaccessible area, and no visible signs of generating a megawatt, but only the say-so of the inventor or the puppet Bass — now there is a legitimate usage of “puppet” — would not impress any intelligent observer. Unless they like seeing all those blue boxes, Rossi did, indeed, put on a show!

But this isn’t the point. Where’s the beef? The other $200 million or so?

Tom Darden, CEO of Industrial Heat, signed a cooperation agreement with a newly created strategic financial center in
Beijing. The “Technology Ministry of Science and Innovation Park” will participate in technology transfer with 20 companies
from the U.S. This sparked rumors that the E-Cat technology recently patented in the U.S. would somehow become the sole
property of the Chinese government. However, these ideas were assuaged, and China invested the equivalent of $121 million USD in LENR technology.

This is copied from Hydrofusion. I’ve added a link that was there. The link is to Google translate for a document on that Park. While Darden is CEO of Industrial Heat, he is also CEO of Cherokee Investment Partners, and many organizations are (or were) involved with that Chinese project. There is no sign that LENR is a major part of it, though it’s certainly not impossible, and Darden may have spoken about LENR in China.

Where were the “rumors” “sparked”? I can think of one likely place, where Hydrofusion might get their information. There was this, about the Park. I followed the link to the article in Chinese. No cheese down that tunnel.

It is clear, though, that Darden was in China representing Cherokee and possibly Research Triangle Park, not Industrial Heat.

And then this E-Cat world article cites Hydrofusion for the $121 million figure. While ECW, following Hydrofusion, speculated that the $121 million was for LENR, the research Park would be a huge project, with probably billions involved. And the plot thickens. From that ECW article:

Alain asked Andrea Rossi if he knew about this on the Journal of Nuclear Physics today, and Rossi responded, “yes, I saw it, it has been reproduced from other publications”. Alain asked if AR was involved in this deal, and he responded, “no, it is an action IH made in his Territory, for which has been licensed from Leonardo Corporation”

Notice that Rossi assumed it was about LENR and the E-Cat.

ele claims that “This figure [$250 million] was cited many times here and no one from IH have never negated it.” Of course, he has just responded to Dewey Weaver, the only person blogging on these issues known to be from Industrial Heat — as a contractor for them and investor, apparently from the beginning, who would know about such transactions as an insider — who had just denied it. If ele is not lying, ele is not seeing what is immediately in front of him.

Trolls, when they make mistakes, almost never go back to correct them….

Frank Acland went on:

It’s still a bit vague as to what exactly is being financed, but Industrial Heat does have an E-Cat license for China. Perhaps they are going to be manufacturing E-Cats in China in this Science and Innovation Park that has been established, or since IH is supporting other LENR groups, funds could be used for supporting non-E-Cat LENR technologies.

Still, it this number of accurate, it shows a significant commitment from the Chinese to support the development of LENR.

Like much speculation on E-Cat World, there is practically no basis for this. Someone might, I suppose, have asked Hydrofusion where they got that information. Did they? AlainCo asked Rossi, not Hydrofusion, but Rossi only had second-hand information.

There is no evidence I’ve seen anywhere that IH received substantial funding from China. The agreement signed, from the Chinese sources, was for technology cooperation in establishing a research center in China, there is no clue of any major investment in (or involvement by) Industrial Heat.

The Darden visit to China was in September, 2013. IH had just received the 1 MW Plant. It is highly unlikely they would have been heavily promoting anything at that point.

So that is not a “Rossi Says”.
Here :
https://translate.google.com/t…spx%3Fid%3D845&edit-text=
is the photo of Darden in China…..

Darden visited China, proving … proving what?

That there are “documents of the trial” is “ele Says,” which certainly sounds like Rossi Says. Now, Rossi has seen IH discovery, that we, as the public, have not seen. To reveal this, though, ele would have to out himself. More likely, Rossi, like others, picks up rumors and repeats them as fact, particularly when they serve his purposes. The general purpose here would be to provide “evidence” that the IH people (a whole series of them) are liars, since they claim they could not confirm the technology, but they “sold” it to so many investors for so much money.

Of course, in September, 2013, IH had not had time to confirm the technology, other than by relying on the Validation Test and Penon’s analysis. Rossi Says is commonly clueless about time, when things happened.

Eric didn’t buy it.

Well, let’s look at the (surely misleading) numbers you quote. Nominally from Woodford we have 50 million, and nominally from the Chinese we have 121 million. That’s 50 million + 121 million = 171 million dollars. You’re short by 79 million to get to your 250 million that you’ve mentioned on several occasions.

Normal people will concede points to trolls. Eric, here, is not accepting the $121 million figure, but is only pointing out that the original claim of $250 million is off by a third, even if that figure is accepted.

Now let us recall the article that clarified that only 20 or so million from Woodford had been disbursed to IH.

I noticed the problem here and so did ele, of course. “The article” is vague, and what is reported is possible an interpretation, by someone unspecified. What I know of is the IHHI financial information. It does not specify what is “disbursed to IH.”

Go to Companies House.

07 Nov 2016 Total exemption full accounts made up to 31 December 2015

I can read and interpret this such that, as of the end of December, 2015, the first year of IHHI operation (the Woodford investment was in May, 2015), IHHI had spent roughly $17 million in the year, and had current (short-term) liabilities of about $3 million. They had cash beyond those short-term liabilities of almost $14 million, but they had “investments” valued at almost $28 million. Without knowing what those investments are, saying that only $20 million was disbursed could be very misleading. That might, for example, include the value of IPH, i.e., mostly of the Rossi license. The total investment in IH was about $20 million, raised from the original group of investors, apparently. (That was the stock issue authorized when they raised the $11.5 million in 2013). So, with the Woodford $50 million, of a total of $70 million raised, it appears that it has been spent on Rossi and other operations, so far, leaving roughly $14 million. We could probably come up with what they have spent on Rossi, I think that’s a court document. Millions of dollars went to Ampenergo, all part of the cost of the original Agreement.

And let us recall that the Chinese number was probably a commitment and does not appear to have been intended to be directed to IH.

Speculation but reasonable. The stories cited as sources in the old discussions of the China connection do not show any investment in IH, at all. This was, first of all, Cherokee participation, not IH. (Confusing Cherokee with IH is a Planet Rossi trope, it’s very common, and there are news stories that also confuse the two.) Then this was all about a technology park in China paralleling Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Not about LENR. That was Planet Rossi speculation, making the kinds of assumptions often made in that community.

There is no source for the $121 million, which is an awfully specific number to stand as a vague rumor.

We are now far shorter [short of] the 250 million. Please stop repeating that IH raised 250 million as though it were a fact unless you can substantiate it. Or, if you do repeat it as though it were a fact, your post will probably go into the bargain bin.

Clearance Items. Far superior to arbitrary (or judgmental) deletion.

ele came back again.

Eric Walker wrote:

That’s 50 million + 121 million = 171 million dollars.

This is not just few money. I remember also other figures in the docs and I will search the exact document….. but ok lets take 171 for now

In other words, “I was wrong but I win anyway, because $171 million is a lot of money! Therefore Darden is a lying crook! That I lied is not important. So what if I lie? I’m just a troll, you don’t know who I am, and I can disappear anytime I like, like randombit0.

Eric Walker wrote:

Now let us recall the article that clarified that only 20 or so million from Woodford had been disbursed to IH.

Please cite the aricle yourself. You have not.

Above I cite a source. I think, though, that Eric had something else in mind, that IH spent about $20 million on the Rossi affair. That wasn’t from Woodford, though some of the last expenses may have been supported with Woodford money, through IHHI, which is sole owner of IH.

Eric Walker wrote:

And let us recall that the Chinese number was probably a commitment and does not appear to have been intended to be directed to IH.

Are you sure ? The only internet articles I found with this figures are related to Darden visit. Remember that IH holds the rights for China.

This was all Planet Rossi, making assumptions, i.e., Darden = Industrial Heat = Cherokee. The articles actually talk only about Cherokee and Raleigh and Research Triangle Park there. No mention of Industrial Heat. Somewhere, though, there is an indication that Darden may have mentioned LENR. The timing of the Darden visit to China is an issue here. It was September, 2013, when IH had only the month before received the Plant, certainly did not have time to test it.

Yes. IH holds the E-cat rights for China, which shows what? They were nowhere near starting up manufacture. You can’t make millions if you can’t make one. Cherokee doesn’t hold the rights, never invested in Industrial Heat. Rossi was never clear about who and what he was dealing with.

Eric Walker wrote:

Or, if you do repeat it as though it were a fact, your post will probably go into the bargain bin.

As you see I’m not repeating.

I feel, but of course I can be wrong, that there is a double standard here. People from IH can openly offend and insult other while I’m just trying to reconstruct how much money IH has rosen.

Raised. Liar.

He is trying to prove something, not to learn or “reconstruct.” There are, so far, no sources for either the $200 million or $121 million figure, other than a report from Hydrofusion that seems to have inspired a flock of reports. That report is itself vague and implies previous discussion, talking about “rumor” The story has “the equivalent of $121 million,” implying that this was not a US dollar investment, and many have opined that if China were to invest, it would not be in a U.S. company like Industrial Heat or IHHI (which denominates investments in USD).

We know how much money IH has raised: $11.5 million in 2013 with a stock offering, with that issue allowing up to $20 million, and since they needed more money, I assume they did raise it, probably up to the limit. Then Woodford invested $50 million in IHHI, and there may have been some smaller investments, I don’t recall the numbers. So we are looking at total investment, not counting promised future investments, of roughly $70 million. There is no sign of anything else. It certainly isn’t in IH Holdings International, Ltd.

No, ele was claiming that Dewey Weaver, who would actually know, was lying, by claiming that this $250 million figure was well-known and then, nutty as it was, pointing as proof to a way-crazy web site, donbot.com, without bothering to look for actual sources.

And then there was this unfortunate post:

Rends wrote:

The main question remains, had IH the full sum of money in order to meet the obligations of the license agreement at any time available?. The answer is no!

Speculation as to how they could have raised money is superfluous, because they have signed a contract with the knowledge that they can possibly not raise the sum and so they could not be interested seeing Rossi successfully running a long term test – because they did not have that $89 million at no time!

Rends, quite simply, has not been following the documents (and has shown that he doesn’t understand what he does read). Woodford gave $50 million to IHHI to support LENR research, and committed another $150 million. If it were needed, they had found the money. No, they never had it sitting in the bank, but companies almost never do. Money sitting in a bank is wasted. They didn’t have the $10 million for the IP payment either, until a few days before. But they knew how they could get it.

I signed a contract to buy a house, to pay the better part of a half million dollars for it. I didn’t have the money — but I secured the agreement with $1000. This is totally routine! For a house, I could obtain a mortgage, and did. It is paying large sums for nothing, or something of highly speculative value, that’s difficult, but Darden has high experience at risky investments. The companies he has started through Cherokee, investing about $25 million of Cherokee funds, have often raised hundreds of millions of dollars, it appears, with investments and loans and grants.

See the Ampenergo memo for information about the Woodford commitment, but there are other documents in the record. The idea that IH didn’t have the money, and therefore defrauded Rossi when they signed the Agreement, is a standard Planet Rossi trope. Rossi himself apparently believes it. His attorneys tried hard to claim that.

I transcribed the entire memo.

this is from the first page of it, dated October 3, 2014:

Woodford > first deal / public deal
$25-50 M (up to $200 M) (or more if they need to buy out Rossi)
Dutch entity > will become parent
Dutch entity > currently a subsidiary of IH. IH’s IP has been transferred to Dutch entity

So an initial Woodford investment was planned by October 2014. The plan then was to make IPH (“Dutch entity”) the parent. Instead, Woodford wanted IHHI to be formed in the U.K. (see page 7 of the memo).

The Ampenergo memo is devastating to many Planet Rossi tropes. Cassarino was (and, I’m told, remains) a friend of Rossi, from way back. Ampenergo had invested in Rossi. Ampenergo is also an investor in IHHI; owned equity in IH; this in lieu of some of what IH owed Ampenergo for their release of the License to them.

Any questions?

Enough idle chatter, the market is the judge

One minute of silence is worth a lifetime of idle chatter.The Joys of Live Alchemy, Michael Levy.

“Enough idle talk.” He stood up. “I must return to the laboratorium.” “But, sir, can you not — ” “I have no time for petty matters,” he said, turning for the stairs. Alchemy and Meggy Swann, Karen Cushman.

Bernie Koppenhofer
April 6, 2015 at 8:09 PM

Dr. Rossi: There are so many super skeptics ready to discredit your results (should they be positive (: ) what steps have you taken to insure the results are “iron clad” showing your customer has saved x amount of dollars during your year long test?

Andrea Rossi
April 7, 2015 at 7:41 AM

Bernie Koppenhofer:
The rules of the market are totally strange to the chattering: if the test on course will confirm that the E-Cat works and the Customer is satisfied, the E-Cats will invade the market.

I give you a simple example: when cars have been invented ( late XIXth Century) most of experts said that those things could never substitute horses, for a lot of reasons, theoretical and experimental.

But cars worked, people bought them when the industrial manufacturing made an accessible price available and from then the contrary opinion of the experts counted nothing.

This is how things go: what is important is not what sceptics say, what is important is the product works properly.

Warm Regards, A.R.

Setting aside the weird argument about cars, Rossi has long argued that the market is the judge. Real customers, real money changing hands, real power being generated and used, saving the customers money and them gratefully paying for that.

Andrea Rossi:

June 9, 2010 at 8:13 AMFortunately, the real judge is the market: to copy a paper is easy, to say to have invented something is easy, but to sell and make a plant you need the plant. That’s not easy and that’s the real difference between a wannabe and a technology maker.

January 16, 2011 at 4:01 PMWe have passed already the phase to convince somebody. We are arrived to a product that is ready for the market. Our judge is the market.

April 16, 2011 at 2:27 PMThis is why we continue to repeat that the market, only the market will be the final judge: if our E-CATS WILL RESPECT THE GUARANTEES OF ENERGY PERFORMANCE AND SAFETY, WE WILL BE PAID. This is the sole validation that counts really, at the end.

August 7, 2011 at 3:45 PMI have already explained all that my attorneys told me to explain. The rest will come from the Court. Of course during a litigation there are two different versions, this is why we want a vedict made by a judge, to have an undisputable truth. Facts, not chatters. And, by the way, there is not much to dispute: we made all our duties, they did not respect their financial obligations. The sole reason of the break is this, all the rest is chatters.

Deja Vu all over again. “The market is the judge,” until the Judge is the judge, apparently. This was all chatter. As is common, Rossi does not understand legal process. It does not generate — nor does it need, in civil matters — “indisputable truth.” Markets, to be sustained, ultimately need to be grounded in reality, that is the reality behind Rossi’s oft-repeated and hypocritical claim.

The above was about Defkalion. It appears that Defkalion, taking a closer look at Rossi claims, decided they could fake heat just as easily as Rossi, at lower cost. The market judged. As far as we know, no litigation or arbitration was filed. (But we do not know with clear and legally-admissible evidence what happened with Defkalion, unlike the case with Industrial Heat, where there is an enormous body of sworn testimony, which Rossi and proxies continue to lie about. I am here looking at a tiny fraction of it.)

July 26, 2012 at 9:01 AM: I am not at all worried about external reactions. I receive daily blackmails, insults, subtle proposal of collaboration aimed to hit us from snakes disguised as enthusiast friends….( we have very good intelligence): just tennis balls against a tank. We are marching, the market, supreme judge of any product, will confirm if our work is useful or not.

The market has spoken, mostly by not speaking. Rossi, in April, 2015, misled a strong supporter of his, Bernie Koppenhofer, about the “customer.” How did he established that the “customer” was satisfied? Who was the customer?

There were two, one paying real money, the second a legal fiction, nothing other than Rossi and Friends, run entirely by Rossi, funded entirely by Rossi, with Rossi as sole defacto authority while pretending independence. How would we know if the “customer” was satisfied?

Rossi hired a retired engineer, paid him to speak for the customer, and told him what to say, this is all in the attested evidence, indisputable. That engineer, James Bass, told visitors that he was very satisfied. Johnson, the President of Leonardo Corporation and of JM Products, Inc., the shell corporation Rossi and Johnson created, owned by a trust with an old friend of Rossi as beneficiary — the old friend put in no money and risked nothing — supported Bass and Rossi claims by submitting invoice requests to be billed $1000 per day per megawatt, as informed by Rossi.

So, of course, if a “customer” was willing to pay so much for power, it must be real! But who would have paid those invoices, if IH had gone ahead and submitted them?

Rossi paid all JMP expenses through Leonardo Corporation, this is totally clear. Rossi claims that this was to be repaid by JMP out of the sale of processed product. Sale to whom? To Leonardo Corporation, of course — or anyone else who buys the product. What product? “Product” is alleged, as a vague word, but what do we see when we get down to brass tacks, real market considerations, when we look at “how much product?” What was the product made from? A few grams, at most, of palladium sponge. No matter what was done with that sponge with low-temperature steam, the “megawatt” could have been replaced by any ordinary tea kettle, for far, far less than $1000 per day. And then there is a claim a small amount of graphene processing. Again, no sales actually evidenced, and certainly no independent sales. This was Rossi playing with some materials, at enormous cost, in order to have a cover story.

The only “market” here was fake, and Rossi lied about it again and again. Something may be noticed, though. Rossi did not directly lie to his fan. He merely allowed the fan to read his comment in a certain — normal — way. This is quite visible in many filed documents. Rossi did not, in writing, claim that the “customer” was Johnson Matthey, but wrote many things that would be read by a normal person as confirming the JM involvement, and, as well, claiming an independent customer, strongly implying it was JM, reporting what the customer supposedly told him — when, in fact, he was, for all intents and purposes, the customer.

What brought all this up for me was an ele comment on LENR Forum.

JedRothwell wrote:

Rossi’s 1-year test is not a scientific claim. It was a crude attempt to defraud people. Anyone familiar with conventional instruments and boilers can see that the Penon report is fake, and that even [if] the data and configuration in it were real,

Again your usual Leit Motive. Now you push even further no evidence eve if data is true.

A perfect example of “Four legs good, two legs bad” statement something you have to repeat and repeat and repeat so to try to convince others.

Idle chatter, evidence-free. The issue of the Penon report data has been extensively discussed, and is at issue in the trial.

Rothwell’s point stands, the Penon Report is not a “scientific claim.” One could never get it published in a scientific journal. The only reason Penon is not a counter-claim defendant in Rossi v. Darden is that he disappeared, made himself unavailable to be legally served. One of Penon’s largest errors was in his claim that it was unnecessary to even inquire about the customer’s usage of power. This was not the statement of a “nuclear engineer,” but a legal and business opinion, and any engineer worth his salt would know that one needs as many validations of measurements as possible.

If Rossi really did have a heat exchanger running, that could have been an independent validation, from measurements of the air flow and air temperature elevation. Much more likely, at this point, is that Rossi simply lied about that, this time under oath, and my suspicion at this point — I am not a lawyer — is that this might be provable beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard for a criminal conviction.

Rossi has accused Darden, in a pleading, of perjury. He may want to duck, bounceback incoming!

So for you a COP >80 is nothing ?

http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-c…7/03/197-03-Exhibit-3.pdf

This is the exibit. If you don’t agree go in the Court and explain your reasons under oath.

Very Planet Rossi, ignorant of legal procedure. Rothwell has no standing to say anything in Court, unless subpoenaed. He isn’t a witness, he is an independent observer with substantial experience relating to what he writes about. Rothwell saw Penon data long ago, and wrote about it, and was roundly criticized for claims that he could not prove. The actual Report, once published, confirmed what he had written.

Planet Rossi misrepresents IH claims in the suit. They have not claimed that anyone “faked” data. Rothwell might say that, casually, but he’s not in Court, is not IH, and is not speaking for IH.

“Fake” data is not well-defined. What is clear from the Penon data is that something is off. Just to start, the data was crudely reported, making analysis very difficult. Fabiani’s data shows that data collection, while reported to four significant figures, very high apparent precision, was, in fact, only digitized crudely, losing much information. The instruments were poorly chosen. Legally, Rossi can defend that by claiming that IH approved the “test protocol,” which appears to be true or at least reasonable, but there is no evidence that the “test protocol” was for a Guaranteed Performance Test, merely for a different “350 day test” with Penon as “ERV” — and that itself was never explicitly confirmed. This appears to have been done because Rossi wanted it — and didn’t mention “test.”

Rossi represented the Doral installation as an opportunity to sell power to an independent customer — allegedly much more “believable” than the test IH wanted to set up — and to demonstrate the technology for investors, to sell Plants, costing only $200,000 to make, for presumably much more (Rossi’s megawatt Plant price was $1.5 – $2 million, stated at various times.) Suppose he’d been straightforward and had written “and we can complete our Guaranteed Performance Test, so you can pay me the $89 million that is burning a hole in your pockets. Heh. Heh.”

I think we know what the outcome would have been.

Rossi claimed IH didn’t have the money to pay, never intended to pay, but this is all extensively contradicted by the evidentiary record.

What is most bizarre here is not that a lunatic or con artist — I’m not sure which it is! — is crazy or lying, but that he has fans who continue to support utter nonsense, repeating it as if fact. If they read the court documents, it’s even more amazing to me. If they go back and read JONP, how can they miss it?

But people apparently do miss it.

Apropos of little, I just watched a bit of Feynman. Don’t fool yourself, for you are the easiest person to fool.

So, what’s it like to be a 17-year-old kid, over the top in intelligence, I didn’t know anyone as smart as me … until I went to Cal Tech, where comparisons became difficult. Like me, many had 800 Math SATs. Off-scale. … what’s it like for such a kid to meet Feynman?

You could ask!

And what’s it like for that kid, now in his 70s, to read “science-worshippers” — “cargo cultists” in Feynman language — like Henry … or, for that matter, so apparently on the “other side” … ele?

(Or before ele, randombit0)

… with their comments about Science and “professors” that show terminal cluelessness as to the science, the love of beauty and truth and reality beyond authority and attachment, I drank with milk, sitting with Pauling and Feynman and then diving into the pool myself.

Fun, that’s what it’s like, tinged with a sadness. Life can be so much better! A kind soul just gave me a session in an isolation tank. Yipee!

A word to the wise is sufficient – a hint to the foolish is proof

Transmutation is accomplished by complementing the frequencies of the elements by means of symphonic wave interactions of light and sound.

from Cabalsgame.com

My occasion here is a post by Ahlfors on LENR Forum. This was put up in Rossi v. Darden Developments, where it was almost totally off-topic, then moved to the Playground.

“There is no $250M investment from anybody (yet) and your ongoing spewage that R was central to anything … Cheers, Sustain and Godspeed”

The quotation was from Dewey Weaver. I’ll return to the “$250 million” issue below. “Sustain” was sarcastic, imitating RossiSpeak.

And then followed an Ahlfors trademark, an image of text, with no source. I googled a phrase from it and found the source, the description of a fraud involving the sale of a right to purchase stock that allegedly gathered 2,000 pounds within hours of opening an office in Cornwall — and then the seller disappeared with the money, about $1 million in today’s dollars.

The book is The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison, By John Emsley, and it has an extensive section on alchemy, and this passage was a piece of it.

This led me to Franz Tausend, and the lead phrase apparentlylfrom him(?).

See also RexResearch on Tausend. From that article:

Just before World War II, a controversial young man named Franz Tausend entered into the industrial manufacture of gold. His business methods led him to be accused of fraud, but there is some evidence that he actually did realize the secret of low-energy transmutations of base metals to gold.

There are many aspects to this old story of interest to us. And none of it proves anything, other than the human propensity for foolishness, and for treating managed demonstrations as if scientific evidence.

Ahlfors seems to be suggesting that there is chicanery involved in Industrial Heat. Planet Rossi commonly suggests that there is something sinister about “shell corporations,” though, as far as what I’ve seen, there are multiple entities, all right, but with an open and reasonably logical relationship. The plan was to move overall ownership to IPH in the Netherlands, but when Woodford came on board, they wanted a U.K. company to be formed, since they were becoming — by far — the largest investors. So IPH remains a simple holding company for the IP, owned entirely by IH which is owned entirely by IHHI.

The idea of $250 million disappearing is common on Planet Rossi, I think Rossi has mentioned it several times. I did some digging on this and found that there was a claim of $200 million being invested in a Chinese venture loosely connected with Darden — who definitely visited China. There is nothing more than a vague hint that this had anything to do with LENR, and this would have been Chinese money going into a Chinese venture, not Darden’s pocket, as is commonly and casually assumed. There is nothing to connect this Chinese investment — if it existed at all — with Industrial Heat and the Rossi Agreement, other than Rossi’s idea that the world revolves around him.

So ele bringing up the $250 million, as one of his many RossiSpeak posts, is not surprising.

Rossi has been fishing for dirt on IH:

Anonymous
May 28, 2017 at 8:43 AM

Dr Andrea Rossi:
The puppets of the “ventriloquist of Raleigh” have made a mess about your past, from which you have been cleared, but we have discovered that Cherokee and Tom Darden, through affiliate companies, have a very dirt skeleton not only in their past, but also in their present, related to series of frauds in the environmental and financial fields, about which they are far from being cleared. We are a group of American citizens that sustain your work and we are disgusted by what is going on against you. We are preparing a dossier completed with all the precise references about what written here above. Where can we send it?
Never give up, you will win this litigation and from the papers so far published your case is much stronger than theirs.
Anonymous

Andrea Rossi
May 28, 2017 at 1:46 PM

Anonymous:
No comment.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
P.S.
Send the evidence, if any, to:
info@leonardocorp1996.com

The appearance of posts on Rossi’s JONP blog that repeat the Rossi party line, using the same idiosyncratic phrases, such as “the Ventriloquist of Raleigh,” apparently Tom Darden, and using other Rossi language (such as “sustain” for “support.” That was pointed out as a false friend cognate from Italian. (The U.S. English usage would have “sustain” mean “provide material support for,” not just approval, the way Rossi uses it, “thanks for the sustain,” and he doesn’t mean “thanks for the donations,” he uses it for any comment of praise or appreciation.

There is no evidence that Darden is involved with any of the derisive commentary on Rossi or Planet Rossi, found mostly on LENR Forum, and setting aside Dewey Weaver, who is openly an investor in Industrial Heat, a contractor to them, and who is strongly opinionated; there is no clue that Weaver is commenting on behalf of Darden, he is simply an insider with a higher level of direct knowledge than almost everyone who writes on the subject.

Rossi, however, formally accused IH of a defamation campaign, based on communications with Levi and Bo Hoistad, targeting his Nobel Prize chances. That fell like the lead balloon it was. (There is no Nobel Prize for engineering and invention; this was all a fantasy rooted, apparently, in the late Sven Kullander being on a Nobel committee.)

IH has not emphasized the Rossi past, aside from the technical violation of the Agreement with regard to tax payments; that only got attention because Rossi, instead of simply admitting what was true and, if there had been a problem, asserting that it was fixed and ultimately harmless — which it apparently was — made a huge fuss about how it was all coming from evil intentions to bring up his “messy” past.

Rossi and others routinely lie about that past. It was not all “cleared up.” Rossi served time and was released for time served, not because of being “cleared of all charges.” This is all irrelevant to Rossi v. Darden, it only makes a difference in how people moralize about it. Darden and Vaughn, like anyone with a serious interest in LENR, knew about that past. My own conclusion was that — obviously — there was a risk of Rossi being dishonest, but that we could not tell the difference between an inventor who wanted to look like a con artist (the Mats Lewan idea, after Rothwell) and a con artist who wanted to look like an inventor looking like a con artist.

Rossi approves all posts for JONP, presumably. He picks, then, what will appear, and, over and over, it’s what he wants to say or suggest. Then, for legal reasons, he writes “no comment.” Even though sometimes he comments.

The dirt referenced almost certainly is about Cherokee Investment Partners, because this has been brought up over and over, on JONP and on LENR Forum, and even here as an anonymous comment that was irrelevant where placed (this has nothing to do with Rossi v. Darden).

Leanne Tuffey
May 29, 2017 at 11:31 AM
Dr Andrea Rossi:

I agree with the comment of Anonymous published here yesterday and I too have information to send you on the matter. They are “serials” and repeat every year the same things with the same system.
I am sending too material to you.
Godspeed,
L.F.

Andrea Rossi
May 29, 2017 at 12:29 PM

Leanne Tuffey:
No comment.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
P.S.
Send the evidence, if any, to
info@leonardocorp1996.com

If it is every year the same, how many years have they been at it? There ought to be copious evidence, one would think. The evidence that has been presented, so far, is miniscule and inconclusive, showing nothing more than ordinary business for the kind of venture capital operation that is Cherokee.

If these JONP posters are real people, they are idiots.

Nobody has been censoring this “evidence.” However, it seems LENR Forum is getting a bit weary of the repetition.


Update

Today this appeared on JONP:

Anonymous
June 4, 2017 at 8:41 AM

Dr Andrea Rossi:
Did you receive the papers that Leanne and Tuffy promised you regarding Cherokee?

Andrea Rossi
June 4, 2017 at 2:36 PM

Anonymous:
Yes, I received 1247 pages related to the activity of Cherokee from 2002 to today. We are studying. …

I’d be astonished if Rossi asked his attorneys about this and they said, “Sure, fine publish that!” Unless they wanted to earn more fees. Rossi has provided, on the blog, with this reasonable cause for a request for production of those pages and all information about their provenance.

If these people had truly hot material, seriously harmful, they would be doing harm to Rossi by providing him the information like this, distracting him (dirt about Cherokee is irrelevant to Rossi v. Darden and he would not be able to introduce it unless somehow it were directly relevant and he could show that), and tempting him to break various laws or commit various torts.

Anyway, I decided to look for more comments about Cherokee on JONP.

April 26, 2016, a post by Luis Navarro copied gossipy material from comments on Lewan’s blog, by Josh G. Most of it is familiar. Looking over that Lewan blog page, we can see the same arguments that have been presented over and over, questions asked as if they have never been asked before, even though they have, and have been answered ad nauseum. (But, there, some of these are asked for the first time, though, to be sure, taken from Rossi’s Complaint as if the claims there were fact.

April 7, 2016, Rossi made his classic claims:

In the press release of IH they write that ” for three years they tried to replicate the Rossi effect, with no avail”: very good, but during those three years Industrial Heat collected about 60 million dollars from Woodford, more millions from other sources, exclusively based on my E-Cats technology. This before making shopping to buy other patents. Now, the cases are two: either they are lying when they say they didn’t replicate, or they made a fraud collecting 60 millions from Woodford, more from others, not to mention Cherokee fund. You had to see Tom Darden and JT Vaughn dance like ballet etoiles around the investors, showing them the E-Cats, and telling them that the E-Cats had been built by them! “Stellar” coherently Darden, in his role of etoile, repeated to the enchanted attandees, ready to spend 50 millions. Now, that my bill arrived, the E-Cat had not been replicated , they say. For three years. Again, I am just answering to a press release of IH.

Woodford invested $50 million U.S., but it appears from court filings that this was planned before the Woodford visit in February, 2016; Woodford actually closed the investment in May, 2016. The investment was obviously never “exclusively” based on Rossi technology, since it was then spent on other approaches, very little on Rossi. Woodford insisted that this money go into IHHI, incorporated in the United Kingdom, where they could watch it closely. At that Woodford visit, it appears that Rossi paid Bass to be “Engineering Director” of the “customer,” and to tell the visitors how well it was going, how happy they were.

“Just answering”? No, he’s presenting what he imagines is a legal argument, his circumstantial argument that IH must be lying,  one that won’t fly in court. IH behavior in this period is quite well documented. It simply does not match the Rossi fantasy, but Rossi has fans who lap it up.

D.T.
October 19, 2016 at 1:24 PM

Dear Andrea:
As you probably have seen, Brillouin has published their demo at the ICCF of Japan: congratulations, you have got another replication of your effect: their reactor is a true copy of your old Hot Cat. After their agreement with Cherokee-IH, they have got from Darden your technology and replicated it. Probably you noticed that since their agreement with IH, Brillouin has just repeated as a parrot every move of you…even the reactor that resambles a pencil.
You must really be ready to invade the world with a strongly competitive, economy scale based product before disclosing your QuarkX. Cherokee-IH-Brillouin will try to copy the QuarkX immediately and will say that their is “original”. Darden has to make his investors bite the toilet papers he filled with IH, that remained an empty box after your departure from Cherokee-IH. They made the money disappear and substituted it with the toilet papers of things that never worked and never will work. Now they, together with Woodford, must convince all the investors of Cherokee and Woodford that IH has a value of IP worth the money that disappeared from IH. They know that they can replicate you in laboratory, but cannot violate your patents in the real market…Beware, Andrea and remember here you have big friends.
From Russia, with love,
D.T.

I’ve written about D.T. posts before. The language is Planet Rossi, including the “toilet papers” and “they made the money disappear.” Rossi made extensive efforts to discover evidence of disclosure of his technology to Brillouin and others, apparently failing — but IH did have the right to sublicense, under the Agreement. D.T. would be correct that the patents cannot be violated in the real market, but … IH holds a license for the Americans, so if Brillouin does develop a product, with Rossi IP, they would legally be required to pay royalties to IH. However, I’ve studied the recent Brillouin press release and this does not resemble Rossi technology, at all, beyond being nickel hydride. It is also less than convincing, the report from SRI was preliminary and not internally approved by SRI for public release.

Also Planet Rossi is the idea that Cherokee invested in Industrial Heat. Apparently, they never did. IH spent roughly $20 million or so, their original investment, attempting to confirm the Rossi claims. That is the money that “disappeared.” IHHI money, some of it, has been spent on other efforts, supporting research, and apparently has not developed commercially useful IP, and that is surely known to the investors. IHHI, from their formal statements filed in the U.K., is in the field for the long term.

Eric
May 5, 2016 at 12:05 PM

[This begins with “INDISPUTABLE FACTS:” and then proceeds to allege as if it were fact what is innuendo, suspicion, and guilt by association (Cherokee was apparently defrauded at one point) with little fact, and to cite evidence that actually contradicts the claims made, a pattern that also is found in the Rossi pleadings in Rossi v. Darden.]

Ing. Michelangelo De Meo
May 21, 2016 at 9:38 AM

[This points to a mention of Cherokee in a story about investment company practices, referring to a case which I have covered elsewhere. In 2016, Cherokee settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the matter of an apparent accounting error, the allocation of costs for complying with new regulations. This was the equivalent of a parking citation in impact on Cherokee, and the settlement made no admission of any wrongdoing, only error (and thus the minor fine). Rossi thanked Ing. De Meo for the “interesting information.”]

There is a lot more, but … enough for today.

What’s real? Not this, not this.

… is an ancient heuristic.

And if it is a mystery, kill it immediately!

On LENR Forum, Wyttenbach wrote — wandering far off topic, hence moved to the misnamed “Playground,” or do we imagine a garbage dump is a great place to play? —

kirkshanahan : The net is full of unbelievable stories. Even if you would live 1000 years you could only read some of them.

Well, that’s true. It’s unclear, though, how it relates to Shanahan’s post; that unclarity is typical for Wytte. I imagine him commenting in a bar, soused.

People like ABD are still part of “the 28 years wasted to explain LENR” story, because he only knows old stuff. Latest since the Lipinski experiments, we need not to know about Storms, Hagelstein, Mizuno, Takashi etc.. models, because it is now obvious how LENR works.

Wytte always seems to think he knows what escapes everyone else. The “new stuff.” He’s a bit like Axil, but more obtuse, less focused. Takahashi, presumably. My work — for the last eight years, not 28 — is not to “explain LENR.” I don’t care about the explanation, I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime (though it’s not impossible), what I care about with LENR is what I care about everywhere: reality. What we can observe, far less “theory” and “explanation,” which can be very useful, but which also can lock us into frozen modes of thought.

Now, Lipinski. WTF? Okay, United Gravity Corporation. See this old LF thread. Bottom line, this is not “LENR.” It is hot fusion, explicitly from the patents. (Though sometimes “cold fusion” is used to describe plasma fusion with tunnelling; this isn’t related to the Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect.)

As to the UG web site, if I look at more “new energy” web sites with photographs of unobtainable “generators” being used to power cars and homes, I may need help cleaning up the mess.

Thus, “Krik”, have some fun and avoid any debate about a ton of old, stinking fish.

Carp.

Bdw: Lipinski(s) measured “tons” of He…

Wytte gives no link. However, the patent is about alleged proton-lithium fusion, generating “helium ion” byproducts. Alpha particles. On the face of it, if the fusion occurs, from Li-7, it would generate 8Be, which would immediately fission to two alphas, i.e., the product would be helium plus energy.

Moved from this thread with a long name. Eric

Eric, Alan, and Barty are starting to get more pro-active in removing topic dilution. So then maryyugo popped in:

[Quote about ABD from above post by Wytte]

Abd still thinks that dowsing is useful in detecting explosives! he should volunteer to clear a minefield using a dowsing rod to prove his contention.

George has no idea how I think. He’s never understood the discussions. Dowsing — like many other techniques — almost certain functions, to the extent it functions, as indicators for subtle movements of brain activity. Most attempts to test this “double blind” fail for obvious reasons: brain activity requires consciousness and double-blind tests remove the cues that might be useful for the operation of what is generally called “intuition.” The real question, with “explosives,” is not what Hody thinks. The Sniffex — what George has in mind — was a scam. The real question is not if it “actually” detects explosives, but if using it increases detection success. This could entirely depend on the skill and experience of the user, who would be the real detector.

Personally, to clear a mine field, I’d want something much more reliable. Unreliable, however, is not the equivalent of “useless.” I’d prefer an actual dowsing rod, if forced to cross a mine field, not the faux pretend electronics of the Sniffex. And “clearing” a mind field, as Hody suggests, there is no way I’d volunteer for that.

Real life is not a double-blind test, except for some who have their eyes fixed shut, like George Hody.

Meanwhile, all LENR claims are from the “usual suspects”. Let us know when someone can produce a nice, clean ten watts from a reactor, without input power, verified by a credible independent agency like a government lab or renown test lab, for a few months without external power or fresh fuel. Hell, I’d settle for one watt properly measured and truly autonomous.

He’s been saying this for years, keeps repeating it. Who cares what this faux “maryyugo” thinks or would “settle for”? 10 watts? By a credible independent agency or renowned test lab? Okay, how about SRI and ENEA. But for a few months?

This is not the state of the art, and creating and observing an effect, and maintaining it, long-term, are quite different. It is possible it could be done, given enough funding, but would add very little to the science of LENR. This is not where I am recommending research go; rather, before such “demonstrations” could be worth the effort, much more is likely to be needed, as to developed knowledge and techniques.

There are experimental approaches I am considering that would test already-observed effects with input power reduced to zero. In most LENR experiments, “input power” is used to maintain experimental temperature. For practical reasons, this makes the experiment easier. That, however, can be shifted so that environmental temperature maintenance is separated from experimental input power. We do not include in the input power of an experiment the heating of the room in which the experiment is located. This principle does not change if the “room” temperature is raised.

Operating temperature may be maintained with high insulation, using controlled cooling if there is any XP. This is not done in early stages of testing, because it is complex and the only reason to do it could be to satisfy pseudoskeptics, who won’t be satisfied anyway. Scientifically, this is utterly unnecessary effort.

However, maintaining constant temperature is something that is often not done in LENR experiments, and temperature is allowed to rise with XP or claimed XP. This leads to interpretive difficulties. What Storms has reported, recently, is the maintenance of XP when electrolytic current was shut down, but the system was maintained at constant temperature. This is actually consistent with prior work and is technically “heat after death,” showing that, while high loading is well-associated with the onset of the FP Heat Effect, it may not be necessary for the continuance of it. That all deserves deeper exploration.

The reality of LENR, at this point, does not depend on the kind of as-yet-unobtainable results Hody demands. It is well-established by the heat/helium correlation, creating a default understanding that the heat is the result of the conversion of deuterium to helium, and work to verify or disconfirm with increased precision is under way.

(This is in addition to and distinct from the massive circumstantial evidence so often pointed out by Jed Rothwell. All that is important, but not as probative as direct and confirmed and replicable experimental evidence.)

Hody is a classic pseudoskeptic, rejecting definitively whatever he does not understand.

Who is Lipinski? (linkie pls) Not only is it not obvious how LENR works, it is far from properly demonstrated that LENR *does* work.

In addition to being a pseudoskeptic, Hody is lazy. This was easy to find. On one point I’ll agree with George: it is not obvious how LENR works, beyond a default “explanation” that is summary in nature: the FP Heat Effect works by converting deuterium to helium, mechanism unknown. It’s a mystery.

Generally, pseudoskeptics hate mysteries, they will seek to kill them on sight.


I did a little more reading on Lipinski and United Gravity. They misrepresent what they are doing. There is a chart at their web site, under “Our Approach.”

Unified Gravity Hot Fusion Cold Fusion
Fuel Hydrogen and Lithium Deuterium and tritium Heavy water (D2O), hydrogen, and heavy elements
Fusion creation Alternating negative and positive voltage applied to proton-lithium plasma Magnetic pulsing or laser heating D2O electrolysis and other combination techniques
Temperature Room temperature 100 million °C Room temperature
Containment Reaction chamber Magnetic bottle Various
Size 2 cubic feet Truck-size Various
Radioactivity (Byproducts) None (Helium ions) Strong (Neutrons) Strong (Neutrons)
  1. p-Li fusion does not take place at “room temperature.” First of all, they are working with a plasma. While an attenuated plasma is possible at low temperature, if the pressure is low, cold fusion takes place in condensed matter (and is apparently, contrary to what they say, aneutronic, and the product might be helium ions, like they claim for their own process). What are the product energies?
  2. Start off with the reactor energies. It appears to be about 225 eV. While this is far below the energy at which normal proton-lithium fusion rates will be high, it is not “room temperature.” I’m not 100% sure about the conversion of electron volts to temperature, it appears to be about 2.6 million degrees K.

However, this doesn’t mean that their approach is wrong, and it might be, if valid, much better than the d-t reaction used for ordinary hot fusion approaches. It might not be radiation-free, they claim to detect 5.6 and 8 MeV particles coming out. While those might ordinarily be absorbed, they will also cause secondary reactions that could create residual radioactivity. Depending on construction, this could be relatively harmless or dangerous.

But is it valid? The web site doesn’t inspire me, with its breathless predictions. I found no clue of published independent confirmation. At this point, it’s a secret commercial claim, not worth very much. It’s not LENR, as we understand it. The reaction is one of hot fusion, even if it is happening at a relatively low-energy resonance.

The apparent claim of new physics is also not inspiring, if not accompanied by clear experimental evidence. Presumably investors will be shown evidence under NDA, but watch out. Any investor considering this should do serious diligence, obtaining expert advice, the best, about the experimental evidence. Forget about theory (unless it is clearly making verified quantitative predictions). What do they actually have?

A mind is a terrible thing to waste

Kirk Shanahan is the most-recently published, practically the last standing critic of LENR who has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. His view of himself might be that he has demolished “cold fusioneers,” as he has called researchers and writers, but that they are stubborn and refuse to recognize utter defeat.

Funny how easy it is to imagine that about others and not notice the old saw: that when we have one finger pointing at others, we have four fingers pointing back at ourselves. Any sane skeptic must be aware of this problem, and not rely on self-assessment for conclusions about social position, argumentative success, and the like.

On LENR Forum, kirkshanahan wrote: 

Wow…I thought we had dispensed with Abd’s garbage on this forum. Oh well…one more time…

In this case, I didn’t post my “garbage” to LENR Forum, someone else did, and that’s a sign that someone else saw it as worthy of consideration. I like it this way. Consider it some kind of informal peer review. Zeus46 is anonymous, but so is most genuine peer review in journals.

Shanahan has never figured out how to use the Forum quotation interface, which would allow him to properly attribute the quotation. He makes his attitude clear. Most LENR writers don’t bother with Shanahan any more. I’ve taken him seriously, have agreed that some of the dismissal of Shanahan may be unfair, and, as part of this consideration, I have identified and pointed out errors; yet I have never encountered gratitude for this, only abuse. I continue only for one reason: CMNS needs critique, and it’s not easy to come by, so I encourage it.

Because there are now several posts and pages relating to Shanahan, I’m creating a Shanahan category and will be applying it. This post is a review of his LENR Forum comment. I did not make that comment, Zeus46 did. If Shanahan had difficulty distinguishing Zeus46’s comments from mine, Zeus46 did link here.

ABD quoted me and wrote:

KS wrote: There are 38 references listed. 3 of them refer to the ‘general rejection’ of LENR by mainstream science (they refer to the books by Huizenga, Taubes, and Park).

ABD: The books are references for the statement: “The special condition required to cause the LENR reaction is difficult to create. This difficulty has encouraged general rejection by conventional science [13-15] and has slowed understanding.”

My response: What’s yer point???

Shanahan takes every discussion as a debate, and in a debate, some will never concede fact alleged by the other side. It will either be wrong or “beside the point.” Sometimes I have points to make, other times I simply note, for the reader, fact. What I wrote was simple, verifiable fact, and if there is no point to simple, verifiable fact, then there is no possibility of communication. Consensus can be built from fact.

What, indeed, is the point of Shanahan’s asking “What’s yer point???” ??? Someone seeking straight and clear communication would have written nothing or would have written something like “Yes.” Not what he wrote. This has been going on for years.

ABD quoted me and wrote:

KS wrote: If you look closely at Figure 2, you will see the He/Heat values exceed the theoretical amount in some cases.

ABD: No. In one case, the value is on the theoretical amount, but something must be understood about this data. If what is being calculated is the heat/helium ratio, and if the actual ratio is a constant, experimental error will cause greater deviation from the actual ratio if the produced heat (or helium) are at low values. I have never seen the data presented with careful consideration of error bars as they affect the ratio.

My response: As I put in my original disclaimer, I did this review quickly, and Abd has found a minor error I have made. Let me correct that now.

Does he correct the error? (Yes, below.) “I thank Abd for noticing my error.” Shanahan doesn’t do apologies, not that I’ve ever seen. And then he, has, in the past, gone on to assert that it doesn’t matter, because New Reason He Was Really Right. He doesn’t break that pattern here.

(On LENR Forum, authors may edit their posts, so he could actually fix the error. He could use strike-through to avoid making the comments of others unintelligible. He could point to the correction, etc. As of this writing, the original post has not been touched. When I see an error like that, I immediately address it. In a recent post here, I’d made a huge mistake. When it was pointed out, I immediately unpublished that post, returning it to draft status, responded to the user who had pointed out the error, and created a new post documenting what I’d done. And then I fixed the error, and rewrote the post that had depended on it. Shanahan seems to have no concept of using these fora to develop scientific or social consensus. Will he ever turn around?)

What is funny is that once again, correcting my error places Storms in an even worse light.

Once again, we can see the polemic intent. It is about good light and bad light. Does the light change reality? Bad light on something would be bad interpretation. From my own training, what is highly likely is that Shanahan will careen from one error to another, because the error of others is a matter of certainty to him. He won’t recognize nuances, and what occurs to him as a result of his world-view he will think of as plain and simple evidence or … proof. What does he come up with?

Storms’ Figure 2 is an alternative presentation of the ‘heat/helium correlation’ idea. He plots the number of experiments obtaining a value for the number of He atoms/watt-sec that lies within a specified range versus the mid-range value for that ‘bin’, in a typical histogram approach.

Yes.

He overlays a Gaussian fit to the data as a curve on the graph. The number of experiments obtaining a He/heat value in the selected range is indicated by a pink box on the plot. Storms also adds a vertical black line on the plot, and labels it “D+D=He”. I observed pink boxes at larger values than the black line.

Here is the plot:

My mistake was to imagine Storms was using the data from his book’s Figure 47, which does show 1 point above the theoretical line and to assume he’d added a couple more (which would be expected based on prior data characteristics). In fact there are several pink boxes at zero values and most are above the black line. Only 1 lies below. So, my mistake, Storms does NOT show any positive values above the theoretical line.

That wasn’t the only mistake, the imagination didn’t fit what was in front of him. Shanahan, as well, knew that this was not the data from the 2007 book, because there were more data points. Yes, he wrote quickly and without caution.

So, I have to ask, what happened to the data point from Figure 47 that was well above the theoretical line? Apparently, without telling anyone, Storms has rejected that datum.

He does tell us in his formally published paper. And I pointed to this. In correlation studies (and that original figure 47 was a correlation study) one will report all data. In attempting to determine a ratio, one may eliminate clear outliers. I discussed all this, and Shanahan starts out responding as if he has never seen any of this. He is reactive and attached to his point of view, which boils down to “I’m right and they are wrong.” Does he go any further than that?

But that radically alters the interpretation of Figure 2. As I noted in other comments, that one datum alters the estimated standard deviation such that the 3 sigma spread encompasses the 0 line as well as going well over the theoretical line. It also swings the average up a bit. If you clip it out, you get a radically different picture, i.e. supposedly ‘all’ data points are now below theoretical (and we (meaning Storms and other CFers) have an ‘explanation’ for that). In my prior comments on Figure 47 from Storms’ book, I discussed why clipping out that high value was an illegitimate thing to do.

Miles reported it. The purpose of Storms’ Figure 47 has been ignored; it appears to me that it was an attempt to show that the ratio settled as the reported energy (or average power for the collection period, similar) increased. As mentioned above, in a correlation study, cherry-picking results is very dangerous. Miles did not do that. He also has zero-heat and zero-helium results (and three outliers of a different kind, experiments where reported heat was significant, but no significant helium was found). All results are part of Mile’s full consideration. Shanahan almost entirely ignores all this.

Storms’ Figure 47, nor his values on the next page, do not consider the 0/0 or 0/energy values. However, that next page does show the “flyer,” and has a note on it: “eliminated from average.”

So of course Storms looks “worse” in this light. The “light” is what Shanahan sees with his eyes closed. He may again excuse his “errors” — if he does admit error here, I suspect he might not — by his having written quickly, just dealing with one paragraph at a time.

So let’s see if he straightens up and flies right:

The functional difference is that including it leads to the conclusion the experiments are too imprecise to use in making the ‘desired’ conclusion. Excluding it means you can use the data to support the LENR idea. But which of these is forcing the data to a predefined conclusion do you think?

What conclusion? And is it “desired” or observed?

Data like this was enough to inspire about $12 million in funding for a project with the first declared purpose being to confirm the heat/helium correlation with greater precision. That’s the only “conclusion” that I care about, long-term. Long ago, within my first year of starting to again look at LENR evidence, I personally concluded that there was much stronger evidence, with a replicable and confirmed experiment behind it, than was commonly being represented — and that includes representation by the CMNS community. There are historical causes for this that I won’t go into here.

It is SOP to exclude an obvious outlier, when calculating a data correspondence, i.e., a ratio, particularly where the outlier has less intrinsic precision than the other values. Whenever this is done, it should properly be reported; it is unfortunately common for LENR reports to only show “positive” results, perhaps because some workers might do dozens of experiments and only see signs of LENR in a few. That is a systemic error in the field that I’ve been working to correct. Some researchers think it is preposterous to report all that “useless junk,” but that is the kind of thinking that has inhibited the acceptance of LENR, allowing vague claims to seem plausible that it’s all “file drawer effect.”

Abd said: “I have never seen the data presented with careful consideration of error bars as they affect the ratio.” – Perhaps, but I have discussed just that before, and now again in summary. Obviously Abd reads what I write, but apparently very selectively (which is typical of people looking to discredit something but not seeking to understand).

And Shanahan’s response here shows how he understands what I write, which is apparently very little. He does not show evidence of my reading “selectively,” yet proceeds to draw conclusions from his own imagination.

He apparently agrees with me, makes the point that he’s said this before (and he may have, I don’t know). I was writing about what was in front of me, his comments, and commenting, mentioning a problem that I know, and if he were interested in the development of consensus, he’d acknowledge the possible agreement. But somehow he converts this to an intention to discredit him.

Rather, my goal is to separate the wheat from the chaff. What is useful about Shanahan’s commentary? As I think I pointed out, few are paying any attention to him any more. The attention he is getting on LENR Forum and here is almost the entire sum of it. As far as we know, he is not submitting critiques of published papers to journals, nor is he writing and submitting original work or reviews. He is more or less, now, confined to complaining about how he has not been accepted, while continuing to display the personality traits that suppress consideration in the real world.

ABD quoted me and wrote:

KS wrote: I have previously commented in this forum on the related Figure from Storms book, which only had 13 numbers on it rather than 17, where I noted that the spread in the data indicates the precision of this measurement is too poor to allow one to make the conclusions Storms does. This hasn’t changed by the addition of 4 points.

From his notice of 17 rather than 13, Shanahan could have realized that this wasn’t the same data. Likewise what Storms writes about “four independent laboratories,” whereas Figure 47 reported from two. What conclusions? I infer several possibilities from this, one of which is that Shanahan is not truly familiar with the evidence. It can be tricky to remember stuff if you believe it is all bogus, it tends to blur into one solid mass of Wrong. (This is an aspect of how belief undermines clear understanding.)

From the Storms paper under review:

This ratio has been measured 17 times by four independent laboratories, the result of which is plotted in Figure 2. This collection shows a range of values with an expected amount of random scatter. Of considerable importance, the average value is equal to about 50% of the value expected to result from d-d fusion. This difference is thought to result because some helium would be retained by the palladium in which the LENR reaction occurred. When efforts were made to remove all the trapped helium from the palladium, the expected value for d-d fusion was obtained [33].

Figure 2 : Summary of 17 measurements of both helium and energy production during the same study [32]. Superimposed on the distribution of values is a fit to the Gaussian error function. The fit is typical of an expected amount of random error being present in the measurements. The value for this ratio resulting from deuterium-deuterium (d-d) fusion is known to be 23.8 MeV for each nucleus of helium made.

Unfortunately, ref 32 is to a Storms paper that does not contain support for the caption. Decent journal editing would have caught this. I have seen the histogram before, but couldn’t find it easily (as I write this, I still haven’t found it); but I was able, without much difficulty, to find the data, given in Storms Current Science paper, which I cited. It is also in his 2014 book.

ABD: Shanahan doesn’t know what he’s looking at. The “Storms book” he is referring to is Storms (2007). Figure 47 in that book is a plot of helium/heat vs excess power, for 13 measurements from two sources: Miles and Bush & Lagowski. The Miles data is more scattered than the Bush data. Miles includes one value with the lowest heat (20 mW). The associated helium measurement generates a helium/heat value that is an obvious outlier.

This newer histogram I think is from data in Storms book (2014), The Explanation of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction. Table 9 (p. 42) is a summary of values. There are 19 values. It looks like Storms has omitted one value (2.4 x 10^11 He/W-sec) as “sonic” (Stringham), one as an outlier (4.4), and maybe one as “gas loading,” (McKubre, Case), then perhaps has added one. Or maybe he left in the Case value (2.0).

My response: “Shanahan doesn’t know what he’s looking at.” – Really? Really??

Really, really, and literally really. Truthfully and on clear evidence. He didn’t know, and has acknowledged that he thought this was from Storms (2007), when it obviously was not. An error. Small or otherwise.

All-too-common interpretive principle: Your errors are fatal, demonstrating ignorance and stupidity and worse, whereas mine are minor, trival, of no consequence, and I was right anyway.

“I think”? Yes, Abd is right, you have to guess at where it comes from.

Well, I did better than guess, but it’s not a certainty, merely very likely, since Storms has published this data at least twice, once in his book (2014), which Shanahan might not have, and once in Current Science in 2015, with the appropriately named Introduction to the main experimental findings of the LENR field — and this was cited in my response.

This was an actual peer-reviewed paper. I know that my own paper’s review in that Special Section of Current Science was real (and even initially hostile!), and also the copy editing was strong. That’s a real (and venerable) multidisciplinary scientific journal. If Shanahan thinks that nonsense is being published there, he could certainly write a response. If they wouldn’t publish it, I would, I assume, working with him to clean it up — or THH could assist, etc. — arrange publication anyway, but I doubt that Shanahan has tried. (We could help him clean it up, and what he submitted to Current Science would be his choice, not ours. I.e., I would advise, with help from anyone Shanahan was willing to allow to see the draft.

As I noted in my initial review, the referencing on this paper stinks. Where the data comes from is actually not specified, so you can’t check it.

That’s correct that it is not specified, but it is possible to check it.

The citation error is one item on the pile of indications that this was a predatory publisher. I’ve seen this happening to more than one older researcher. Takahashi, a genuine scientist, not marginal, published in a predatory publisher’s journal.

However, what’s the topic here? Formally, on LENR Forum, the topic was the paper. So, granted, it’s poorly referenced. What else can we agree upon? Shanahan wrote, however, about the underlying data, and it’s easy to find the substantially identical underlying data. I did not actually research this all the way. The Current Science paper gives references for all the measured values. With only a little work, someone could reproduce the histogram with full references. How important is it?

From my point of view, all this is likely to become relatively obsolete soon. The standing evidence — which Storms does show, as did I in my own paper — was quite enough to justify significant investment in research funding. Shanahan is, too often, focused on being right, whereas the real world is focused on exploring science and especially mysteries with possible major real-world consequences.

How much attention should be given to Shanahan’s CCS and ATER ideas? Basically, unexpected recombination, the major core of this, should be always be considered with the FP Heat Effect, and, where practical, measured (which can include finding upper bounds). That has already been done to some extent (Shanahan seems to mostly ignore this, but he’s welcome to correct me or request confirmation).

Abd makes some interesting guesses about where it comes from, and most importantly, he notes that Storms’ is picking and choosing what to look at. A clear recipe for making the data say what you want it to say, instead of what it actually says.

Again, he could be agreeing. However, I’ve personally gone through the exercise of looking at what data to present in a summary chart. I wanted to present it all, in fact, all the data we have. I came to realize that this was a monumental task, with hosts of data selection problems. Many of the data points are isolated measurements. Then there are variations in experimental technique. I don’t think that Storms selected the data to show based on desired outcome. On the other hand, Storms does not state how he picked what studies to show.

His 2014 book lists 30 helium studies. Many of them provide no clear information about the heat/helium ratio. Many are obviously flawed in different ways. Post-hoc analysis of correlation studies is problematic; it is primarily useful for suggesting further research. Even the Miles work, which is outstanding for this, was not designed in full anticipation of the importance, and was not uniform experimentally. Miles did not set up a full protocol for rigorous correlation study. Close, but not completely. For example, what do you do if some incident creates possible major error in measuring heat? Miles varied the cathode material and created two outliers (that don’t show in the Storms chart). Apparent heat but no apparent helium. Miles later wanted to study this, I think, submitting a proposal to the DoE, which was denied. I suspect that the importance wasn’t established, and investigating Pd-Ce cathodes remains a possible avenue for research. I do not recommend at this point that the Texas Tech/ENEA collaboration complicate the work by trying to explore outliers. Yet. First things first! Keep it as simple as possible, as few variables as possible.

Right now, I’m only considering, and only a little, Shanahan’s response. A deeper study would list all helium studies and set up some selection criteria in an attempt to generate more objective data for a histogram. It might look at the sources for the histogram and compare these studies with the entire body of studies. Until then, my impression is that Storms’ selection criteria were reasonable; particularly if we understand that what is really needed is more precise confirmation, that this does not shut the book, close the case, lead to a final conclusion, and for what purpose would we even think this?

I notice that Shanahan’s critique here is ad hoc and without foundation. He is essentially alleging cherry-picking without showing any evidence for it. The single outlier is acknowledged by Storms in the prior publications. The failure in sourcing is really a journal failure, my opinion; for when a paper is submitted by a scientist in his eighties, I don’t expect perfection. AStorms did not ask me — or anyone, as far as I know — about the wisdom of that submission there. I’ve advised him against spinning his wheels with useless and unfocused repetition of speculations, his “explanations.” He doesn’t like it. So I’ve mostly stopped.

ABD quoted me and wrote:

KS wrote:

This newer histogram I think is from data in Storms book (2014), The Explanation of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction. Table 9 (p. 42) is a summary of values. There are 19 values. It looks like Storms has omitted one value (2.4 x 10^11 He/W-sec) as “sonic” (Stringham), one as an outlier (4.4), and maybe one as “gas loading,” (McKubre, Case), then perhaps has added one. Or maybe he left in the Case value (2.0).

ABD: It’s been confirmed. Maybe Shanahan should actually read my paper. After all, I cited his JEM Letter. It is not a “hand-waving” argument, but, obviously, this cried out for more extensive confirmation with increased precision. And so, I’m happy to say, that work has been funded and is under way. And they will do anodic erosion, I’m told, to test what is apparent from the two studies that did it (McKubre and Apicella et al, see my paper for references). These are the two studies where dissolving the surface of the cathode took the helium level up to the full theoretical value, within experimental error. Two other Apicella (Violante) measurements did not use anodic erosion, and results were at about 60% of the theoretical.

My response: The quote attributed to me is just what Abd wrote immediately above. Cut-and-paste malfunction. If Abd will actually use my quote I might be able to respond.

Apparently Shanahan did not look at my original comment. It’s here, as cited by Zeus46: Reviewing Shanahan reviewing Storms. What is quotation of Shanahan and what is my comment is clear there, I hope. Zeus46 translated the blog format to LF format and incorrectly set up quotations. It was not exactly a cut-and-paste error, but a reformatting error. Shanahan could easily have responded to what was written; after all, he knows what he wrote and then what I wrote, and he could be even more clear if he actually followed Zeus46’s link and read the original.

ABD quoted me and wrote:

KS wrote: Exactly so. So one shouldn’t try to work with these numbers until they are shown to be free of the errors Storms points out, which hasn’t happened.

ABD: Shanahan ignores that correlation can show relationships in noisy data. (This is routine in medicine!) Leakage, quite simply, doesn’t explain the experimental evidence. It could have had an effect on some individual measurements. No, we were not going to wait for “error-free” measurements, but rather how to proceed was obvious: the data shows quite adequate evidence to justify funding further research to confirm these results, and this is a replicable experiment, even if heat, by itself, is not reliable. The variability creates natural experimental controls.

My response: “Shanahan ignores…” No, I don’t. But Abd ignores the point that correlations derived from fictitious data (excess heat is likely not real) are worthless. For the record, I have been using statistics for many years, and Abd has added nothing to my knowledge base.

And I can see here — and, I’m sure, many others who read this can also see — the problem.

First of all, “fictitious data” is not defined. Shanahan is not actually talking about fiction, i.e., made-up, invented data, as distinct from the results of actual measurements (and calculations from measurements). Correlation is how we distinguish random variation from systematic, causally connected variation. What the heat/helium data shows is correlation, which can be quantified. The quantification shows a high probability that the data is not random.

(Storms uses that data to show the kind of variation typical of experimental data which is, by the nature of the work, approximate, not fully precise.)

There is, then, likely, a causal connection. This, in itself, does not show “nuclear,” only that there is likely some common cause.

Shanahan, when he says that the data is “fictitious,” is actually stating, with remarkable lack of sophistication, that because the heat data might be non-nuclear in nature (his own theory), it’s fictitious, not “real.” That’s preposterous. It’s real, that is, there is actually an anomaly, or Shanahan’s entire publication history is bogus. He is simply claiming that the anomaly is not nuclear in nature. Not “real nuclear” heat. But real heat, in some cases, caused by unexpected recombination, or … a real measurement anomaly, systematic, caused by some kind of calibration constant shift, perhaps caused by heat being generated in a place different from expectation or calibration.

This runs into many problems that he glosses over, but one at a time. Cold fusion researchers have studied anomalous heat, it is often called by a neutral name, like the Anomalous Heat Effect. Shanahan agrees there is an AHE. He claims it is due to unexpected recombination or sometimes, perhaps, other causes.

Great, so far. Now, in some studies, there was a search for other results, measurement of tritium, neutrons, transmutations, and other possible correlated conditions, i.e., material, current density, etc., and in particular, and with the most interesting results, helium evolution (generally in the gas phase in electrochemical experiments, but also some other study).

Helium, of course, could, in some experiments, be the result of leakage. That’s been the standard objection for years. However, in some experiments, helium levels rose above ambient. Still, someone might suggest that local helium was high because of nearby experiments releasing helium.

However, would we expect, then, that heat and helium would have strong correlation or weak correlation? If a correlation is proposed, what would be a plausible explanation for it, and how could this be tested? Have those tests already been done? If not, is it possible to suggest that there be tests for this? Is it plausible enough to justify spending research dollars on it?

Shanahan is clearly rejecting the significance of correlation.

“Leakage, quite simply, doesn’t explain the experimental evidence. It could have had an effect on some individual measurements.” – And it certainly does. But in the ATER/CCS proposed mechanism there is a way to get increasing He signals in cells that show apparent excess heat. You all will also note that Abd does not respond to my specification that lab He concentrations need to be reported. Another thing he conveniently ignores.

I’ve made the same suggestion. I don’t ignore this. Once one is arranging many helium measurements, background helium should be routinely measured. However, Shanahan refuses to recognize the infinite regress he is creating. Some local anomalous helium would be very unlikely to correlate with heat. It would contaminate controls as readily as experimental heat-producing cells. Shanahan here is not being specific; he is assuming that increased heat production represents some major difference in cell behavior. In fact, it’s typically only a few degrees C in temperature, and cells with high heat may actually be at a lower temperature, it depends on experimental details.

And then how likely is it that the ratio ends up roughly on the money for deuterium conversion to helium? With reasonable consistency, over many experiments with multiple research groups? The work that it takes to obtain the AHE and the work that it takes to collect precise helium samples is quite different. The sampling with Miles, at least, was done blind. And Miles did measure background helium, and also studied leakage, quantified it.

“the data shows quite adequate evidence” – As I noted, that is true only if you start dropping out data that causes that conclusion to not be true. That’s bad science.

Shanahan is quoting out of context. “Adequate” had a specific referent, which Shanahan ignores. Adequate to justify new and substantial funding to test the hypothesis. What data? What conclusion? Shanahan is struggling with ghosts, cobwebs in his mind. Must be frustrating.

“The variability creates natural experimental controls.” – What? That makes no sense.

No sense to Shanahan, demonstrating that he is lacking in sense. This is really obvious, so obvious that I’m tempted not to explain it unless someone asks. Okay, I’ll say this much, though I’ve said it many, many times.

What happens with FP Heat Effect experiments is that researchers will make a series of cells as identical to each other as reasonably possible. Further, with heat/helium, the same cell is observed for heat and gases are sampled for helium. With different cells, but ostensibly identical, the only clear variation is the amount of heat, so “dead cells” are controls. What is different about a dead cell vs one showing anomalous heat. This is basic science, reducing variables as much as possible.

When Miles reports 33 observations of heat and helium, with 12 showing no heat and no helium, and 21 showing heat (and 18 showing significant helium), that is not 33 different cells, it is a smaller number, with multiple samples of gas taken with heat measured (and averaged) for the gas collection period.

Unfortunately, not all the cells were identical. However, the single-cell results, showing helium varying with average heat in a single collection period, are self-controls of a kind, because the cell is identical. To discuss this further would require very detailed analysis of the Miles work.

That Shanahan doesn’t see the idea shows that he has never deeply considered these reports, which go back to 1991. He looks at them enough to find what he thinks a vulnerability and takes a potshot. It gets old.

If THH here wants to assist looking more deeply at Shanahan’s claims, great, or if anyone else wants to do that, I’ll support it. THH has already started some of this.

ABD quoted me and wrote:

KS wrote: I published a consistent, non-nuclear explanation of apparent excess energy signals, but of course Storms refuses to recognize this.

ABD: Shanahan expects Storms to “recognize” Shanahan’s explanation as “consistent” with the evidence Storms knows well, when Shanahan, with obviously less experience, does not recognize Storms’ opinions, and merely asserts his own as valid?

My response: Read carefully here folks. Abd is pulling a fast one. He implies I ignore Storms’ opinions/conclusions. I don’t, I provide an alternative. I do not assert it is valid, I assert it has the potential to be valid. Like all proposed mechanisms, it must be confirmed experimentally, but that will never happen when the people who can do so refuse to accept it and instead resort to falsified representations of it to justify ignoring it. Abd’s response above is a veiled ‘call to authority’ (“Storms is the authority and Shanahan isn’t, so believe Storms”) which is recognized as an invalid logical technique, often used to intimidate others into silence. It has no inherent truth value.

I have not said “believe Storms,” and on this issue, in particular, I do not depend on Storms for anything (other than I specifically cited in my own paper).

In fact, I encouraged Storms to write in more detail about heat/helium and he actually wrote a paper on it and submitted it to Naturwissenschaften. They came back and requested a general review of cold fusion. I regret that, in fact, because a general review will cover a vast territory whereas cold fusion needs focus on narrow specifics, confirmed results, and especially the clearest and most widely confirmed.

Storms has made errors in his heat/helium publications and I have pointed them out.

My point was that Shanahan appears to expect Storms to recognize his critiques, when Storms has addressed them — at least some of them, and Shanahan has presented a bit of a moving target — years ago and considers the matter resolved. Shanahan uses Storms lack of continued consideration as if it were proof of Storms’ scientific bogosity.

There is a far better approach, that could work to move beyond the limitations that Shanahan experiences, but it seems he is not interested. He prefers to complain about others. And if this isn’t true, he’s quite welcome to demonstrate otherwise. Starting here and now.

At this point I can’t tell if this is Abd or Zeus46 writing, but whoever it is wrote:

“Shanahan’s views are idiosyncratic and isolated, and he has neither undertaken experimental work himself, nor managed to convince any experimentalist to test his ideas. To the electrochemists involved with LENR, his views are preposterous, his mechanism radically unexpected.

I wrote that, and all Shanahan needed to do to identify this would have been to follow the link in Zeus46’s post. He calls it the “full monty.” I.e., the “real deal.”

Yes, I’m sure that response is frustrating. After all, LENR is anomalous, unexpected. However … Shanahan’s explanations are, generally, a pile of alternate assumptions, chosen ad hoc, and his claim is that they have been inadequately considered, but who decides what is adequate and what is not? Shanahan?”

But these paragraphs are nothing but CF fanatic fantasies. There’s nothing in them worth responding to.

“Who decides what is adequate and what is not” is a question, not a fantasy. I then proposed a possible answer: Shanahan. What does Shanahan think? How does he assess this?

I proposed a practical standard: funding decisions. It’s enough if it is funded, not if it is not.

Nowhere in all this does Shanahan point to any “fantasy.”

He is fighting his own ghosts, wasting his own life. It’s quite common, and this has almost nothing to do with cold fusion, itself. It’s a people thing, and that’s my primary interest: people. Not cold fusion, that’s just something that I happened to learn about, for better or worse.

Mysteries abound when eyes don’t see

When we fail to observe the world carefully, and without strong prior belief, many mysteries appear, and often questions that support prior belief, i.e., argument from mystery, argument from lack of imagination, or, often, very restricted imagination.

When we have knowledge, these questions often vanish because possible answers become obvious, and where these possible answers have high organizational function, we may choose to accept them, at least until we have even more knowledge (i.e., evidence combined with a broad sense of possibilities).

On LENR Forum, SSC wrote (links added)

THHuxleynew wrote:

SSC seems just to be incapable of imagining uncertainty – and then fits his rationalisation around his lack of imagination. In this case that IH could be confused by Rossi’s setups, and the other independent tests, working when their own – done with much weaker technical resources, we know, Dameron, did not. So I have some sympathy with SSC – lack of imagination is no crime.

Error in general is not a crime, except when it is…. The problem is an imagination that follows established tracks, and particularly, here a track laid down by Rossi, as a major theory behind his lawsuit, but that ignores obvious other possibilities, including some well-established by evidence, rather than the kind of imputation that SSC uses here (which Annesser and Chaiken also use, it’s quite visible in the Murray deposition.)

Dear TTH, it may be that I am lacking in imagination, but in any case I would not speak of “uncertainty” talking about IH…. Please read PLAINTIFFS’ REPLY IN SUPPORT OF THEIR MOTION FOR PARTIAL SUMMARY JUDGMENT (doc 254), where you can find these words:

“Notably, Defendants could not point to a single document in which they notified Plaintiffs of their alleged inability to replicate the technology, whether as a result of their incompetence, faulty equipment, inferior materials, or outright lies. See SOF ¶¶ 31, 33. “

This is citing Rossi’s pleading and the Rossi declaration as evidence, and the claim is presented in a narrowed way that might easily be overlooked. There are two general kinds of evidence in the case: documentary evidence and testimony under oath. Documentary evidence will be subject to interpretation, the claim is often that it “speaks for itself,” but here Rossi is referring to what the documents do not say. Maybe. We’d have to look at all of them to verify this. Meanwhile, the public record contains evidence that IH showed Rossi — in person, not by an email and formally — that their tests were not confirming his claims, and that Rossi was irate.

SSC is writing from what he believes, which is ultimately based on Rossi Says, and what he quotes here shows it. That is not admissible evidence. The question asked assumes a context that was missing, open communication. It ignores timing. It ignores what is completely plain on review of the record: IH strategy for communication with Rossi, it was designed and controlled to “not piss him off.” This is so obvious that Annesser uses it to ask Murray why the visit to the plant by Murray was proposed for July 2015, if it was expected that it would upset Rossi.

It obviously did upset Rossi, so much so that he violated the Term Sheet to deny the visit (by generically denying the right to visit of anyone not already agreed, until the “tests under way were complete,” I think is how he put it, as if Rossi had that right. It was the IH Plant and they had a clear right to visit it at any time.

Rossi counsel is attempting to have it both ways: IH should have told Rossi, in writing, and that they did not has some implied meaning, and then that IH was provocative by scheduling the Murray visit. (As if “provocative” has some legal significance here. Annesser and Chaiken seem to be, to some extent, grandstanding for Planet Rossi.)

(IH had no legal obligation until and unless Rossi himself put in writing that the Doral test was the GPT, and that idea is also missing from the documentary record, as to the contractually required prior consent in writing, and probably did not happen until later in 2015. In fairly short order, IH formally challenged the GPT interpretation, but we can see evidence that IH still hoped to negotiate something with Rossi, some test or way of moving forward that could satisfy the parties.)

There are e-mails and documents where you can read that IH has initially obtained good results from its E-Cat tests.

There are documents that can be read that way. However, I strongly suggest reading the Murray deposition, the whole thing (423 pages!). IH largely abandoned its efforts with Rossi by the middle of 2015, focusing on other technologies. It appears that they allowed the Doral test as a last-ditch opportunity for Rossi to perform in some way. There are many other comments in depositions on this. SSC, like Rossi, focuses on a possible fact: no written notice, but ignores all the rest. That Rossi Partial Motion for Summary Judgment failed. Does SSC know why? He is here citing argument that was not accepted by the court, the only part of this that is admissible testimony is Rossi Says, in the form of the Affidavit cited.

After Rossi had sued them, they began to say that they had never seen excess heat. But this complaint never came officially to Rossi. If at one point they really realized they were not able to replicate the reactor, why did not they even send an email to Rossi to tell him about it?

Nor did the Rossi intention to consider Doral the GPT ever come “officially” to IH. Until that intention was registered in writing, it did not create an enforceable obligation. If IH had decided to push and shove, they would have needed to formally notify Rossi of their inability to make devices that worked reliably, when thoroughly tested. (This is not the same as “never seeing excess heat,” unless we are careful about what “seeing” is. Operating reactors do not in themselves display “excess heat.” It must be inferred from measurements, and what is truly bizarre in the history of Rossi Results is that on occasion the results were directly contrary to plain and simple sensory evidence. Instead, error-prone measurements were used and attempts to confirm them (i.e., with control experiments and independent measures) were resisted strongly.

I decided to look at the material quoted by SSC in detail. I had started to look at the Rossi Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, but had originally abandoned it because the exhibit numbering was highly confusing (which was also noted by Industrial Heat in their Opposition.)

So I did a study, published at RvD: Rossi Partial Motion for Summary Judgement – Replication

It takes about a day to do one of these.

This is what I’ve seen about Planet Rossi. It does not appear that those who comment like SSC have read much of the case. The question of why IH would not inform Rossi in writing of their failure to replicate has a very obvious answer, and it’s answered in the documents (because Annesser asks it in depositions!).

Reading the case takes a lot of time. There are many hundreds of often-confusing documents. But if one wants to have an informed opinion, there is no substitute for becoming informed. What I see on Planet Rossi is the repetition of certain simple memes, often repeated.

I also see this from Rossi himself, which should not be surprising.

If anyone wants to move from imagination and fantasy to reality, and on the questions and claims made by SSC, I’d suggest reading, in particular, this, and this. Or read the whole section on replication in the Rossi Partial Motion for Summary Judgement: those links refer to paragraphs in it, as quoted on the Study page. Read the evidences, don’t just read Rossi’s claims based on them — or my comments or IH objections. Read sworn testimony and attested documents, actual evidence that can be introduced at trial.

And notice how, sometimes, pleadings distort the evidence, in ways that are easy to see. Sometimes they actually lie, it’s that blatant. However, it is not unlawful to lie in a pleading, pleadings are not sworn testimony. It’s a crime to lie in a deposition or in the attestations that are sometimes provided. Notice that the witness in a deposition is sworn. The lawyers aren’t.

If life is a vote, I’ll say that the Eyes Have It.

Update

SSC wrote some more:

Darden has raised funds from investors, so it’s fair to suppose he has spoken well of the E-Cat with them. You may also not give too much credit to document 254, but it is a text presented to the judge and can hardly contain easily disprovable things. In that document you can read this:

“There is no written evidence that, prior to Defendants’ receipt of $50 million in investment funds, Defendants ever told Plaintiffs that they believed Plaintiffs had violated the License Agreement or that the 350-day test taking place in Florida was not the GPT. See SOF ¶ 60”

This lack of understanding of legal process is common on Planet Rossi. (It’s common in general, but here it is used as part of a syllogism, one that can easily be shown as a fallacy by simple counterexample). If SSC reads what is linked from above, he will fund abundant claims made in DE 254 that are not supported by the evidence cited or that are even contradictory to the evidence.

One way to explain DE 254 is that this was Rossi’s last chance to lie in his Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, it would not be contradicted by IH. So he repeated stuff from before, ignoring contrary evidence and response. Just saying it over again. If his goal was to fire up his base, it worked. I don’t think SSC is Rossi, the English is too good. Though it could be an English-speaking puppet.

What is not true: the claim that the Defendants received $50 million. They did not. The $50 million was received by an independent U.K corporation that is not a defendant in Rossi v. Darden, but the distinction — which is legally quite clear — is suppressed in Rossi claims because he is playing on emotions. Here there is an attempt to connect the $50 million with the GPT issue, as if it is somehow relevant. Unfair!!!

What is not true: that IH never told this about the GPT to Rossi. They obviously did, from evidence presented. However, the question is not whether, but when. It was certainly before the end of the test, but IH would not say that to Rossi, for all the obvious reasons, until and unless Rossi claimed the reverse. We don’t know when Rossi first claimed that Doral was the GPT, but there is no evidence of it being mentioned when the move was planned to Florida, and no mention, as far as I’ve seen, until IH and Rossi started communicating through lawyers, and that was clearly before the end of the “test,” easily by about the beginning of December, 2015.

Why would anyone tell him it was not the GPT if he didn’t claim it, and if the context was that Rossi knew the Second Amendment had failed, and the time had expired? IH knew that Rossi knew — because Cassarino forwarded the Rossi mail about it to IH.

What it would have taken to start up a new GPT would have been a written agreement. IH was willing to sign one, the original Second Amendment. That Amendment failed because it required Ampenergo sign-off and Ampenergo refused. But IH could certainly have signed a new Agreement, and would have had no trouble with Ampenergo if AEG rights were respected. So why didn’t Rossi propose that, instead of proposing this cockamamie faux customer? I find the answer to that question distressingly clear. Rossi is crazy, and demands control, doesn’t deal straightforwardly in cooperative enterprises; instead he lies and manipulates. It is crazy rather than merely controlling and selfish, because he is headed for a serious fall, and my guess is that he also dominates his attorneys. They sound like him, except for better English.

As to violations of the License Agreement, and setting aside the various minor alleged violations, SSC would probably be referring to the claim that Rossi may not have disclosed all the necessary IP for replication. We have testimony that IH people complained to Rossi, concerned that they could not replicate. They certainly would not have sued him for failure to disclose unless they first formally claimed the failure, perhaps demanding specific performance. They were not ready to do that, so they didn’t.

Failure to disclose is simply one of the IH stated possibilities: failure to disclose necessaries, or false claims of performance. Annesser is insistent that there are other “logical possibilities.” Maybe the Russians put Darden in a trance so that he couldn’t function to make the fuel properly. After all, if they could steal the fuel from a sealed reactor, why not stealing his mind? Logically possible, hypothetically. Really, we couldn’t make this up.

Read those pleadings and, if you care about Rossi, or about simple honesty and straightforward argument, weep.

Back to the investment, the original IH investment was in 2013 and probably the $20 million issue was completed in fairly short order. The large investment in IHHI came in May, 2015, and was not invested in Rossi technology, i.e., it was not spent, apparently, on attempting to develop E-Cats, more than a little. What of it has been spent already was allocated to diversifying, exploring other LENR possibilities. So what does this have to do with “praising the E-Cat”?

The Woodford rep statement about the Rossi technology as being “core,” besides being often misquoted (including in pleadings and even in a joint stipulation as agreed), is probably, then, a misinterpretation, with the meaning being imputed to make it into something it wasn’t, which has been very common in this case.

Four bit fever

There has been some discussion on LENR Forum of data resolution in the Fabiani spreadsheet. From Jed Rothwell:

LENR Calender wrote:

2) If you look at the T_out data from this file

http://coldfusioncommunity.net…01/0194.16_Exhibit_16.pdf

It appears that it wasn’t to the nearest 0.1 deg C. Here we are working with a discrete set of possible temperature values: 103.9, 104.5, 105.1.

P. 7 shows 4 digit precision.

LENR Calender wrote:

So more accurate would be to say the temperature data was reported to the nearest 0.5 or 0.6 deg C.

I have never heard of an electronic thermometer that registers to the nearest 0.5 deg C. It is always some decimal value: 1, 0.1, 0.01 . . . This one clearly registers to 4 digits, although I doubt the last 3 are significant.

It is clear that this was not an “electronic thermometer,” but a temperature sensor that generates a signal, often it is a voltage, that varies with temperature. As an example, the TI LM34 sensor generates 10 mV per degree F. This voltage may be sensed and recorded by computer using an ADC, which will have a certain resolution. We are possibly seeing the resolution of the ADC. The voltage reading will be quantized by the ADC.

Looking at the data on page 7, we can see that the only Tout values are 105.0728, 104.5046, and 103.9364. The first jump is 0.5682. The next jump is 0.5682, the same. This is 1.02276 F; the resolution is close to 1 degree F.

I’m suspecting an 8 bit ADC, with full scale being 256 F. Whatever, the resolution sucks. Maybe someone can find the magic approach that explains the exact decimals. (The device provides a voltage which is digitized with the increment being one bit. The temperature is then calculated using an offset and a ratio. This creates the 4-place decimals.)

The Tin temperatures also show quantization. The increment is the same, 0.5682 C., so the values are 63.4544, 64.0226, 64.5908, 65.1590, 65.7272, 66.2954, 66.8636, 67.4318, 68.0000, 68.5682, 69.1364.

That exact value of 68 C pokes me in the eye…. coincidence, perhaps.

There is no sign of calculation roundoff error there; these numbers are likely multiples of 0.5682 C exactly, plus some offset. The recorded data may have been volts, recorded to a certain precision, and then for the spreadsheet this was multiplied by a constant, so the quantized voltage then shows up as quantized temperature. This was not recorded with high precision.

The pressure is also apparently quantized. Now, this is wild: the pressure is close to 1 bar. Absolute pressure, not gauge. The only values shown are 0.9810 and 1.0028, and the value oscillates between them. So the increment is 0.0218 bar. What gauge was this? Penon had said he was going to use PX3098-100A5V, an Omega gauge. This is a 6.9 bar full-scale absolute pressure gauge. The specified accuracy is +/- 0.25% FS, so it would be +/- about 0.02 bar. Then we have possible digitization error, so total error could be 0.04 bar.

The digitization error was unnecessary, at this level. Besides the fact that the pressure gauge selected was too insensitive if pressure was going to be close to 1 bar, the quantization indicates that low-resolution ADC was used. Who chose the ADC hardware? Fabiani?


Update

I took the first page of Fabiani data, loaded it into a spreadsheet (I used the OCR’d version of the file from thenewfire), sorted it by pressure, and then averaged the temperatures. The results:

0.9810 bar, 19 values, average temperature is 104.5345° C.
1.0028 bar, 28 values, average temperature is 104.5452° C.

A difference of 0.02 bar would ordinarily represent a difference of about 0.54° C for saturated steam.

It appears that the outlet temperature and pressure are uncorrelated.

As has been pointed out by others, it is very difficult to maintain constant pressure and temperature with superheated (dry) steam, as was claimed by Rossi. Saturated steam will maintain a fixed temperature at a particular pressure, but that temperature for 1 bar is 99.63° C.

The temperature does vary, as described above, there are three values for temperature: 105.0728, 104.5046, and 103.9364.

 

Misc and Flabber gas – May 2017

I’ve been watching Judge Judy videos and then I see much, every day, that is, as it were, screaming for comment, examples of how people behave on Planet Stupid. It’s amazing to watch Judge Judy in action — and the other “court shows,” they are pretty much the same. The plaintiff or defendant are stupid, sometimes both of them. “Stupid” means that they don’t see, or refuse to see, what is in front of them, but only stand for what they ‘believe,” usually a variety of “I’m right” and/or “they are wrong.” On Hot Bench, they face a panel of judges, all experienced lawyers at a minimum, with real courtroom experience. From behavior and comments after the show, the parties have learned nothing. And that is often what the Judge is telling them. (“Shut up and put on your listening ears,” Judge Judy says to a plaintiff who is interrupting, insistently, obviously obsessed, obviously not listening.)

Once in a while a losing party will say that they learned something. It’s relatively rare! That happens even if the legal and social issues are open and shut. “I’m right” is the foundational belief for many people, for sure! It’s axiomatic Truth.

Some people would rather die than be wrong. Or even merely to listen to the opinions of others about it, without interrupting. Basic skills.

Index to sections of this post
JONP old crap and where it leads
Long and useless on LENR Forum
Clueless rolls on floor laughing
But What If? RossiSays…
Surprise! Pot Calls Kettle Black!
And now for something completely different

Continue reading “Misc and Flabber gas – May 2017”

Takes a licking and keeps on ticking

Just like a Rossi demo! (Those were the days! Live TV!)

The occasion for this brilliant wit, a masterpiece, if I say so myself, and I do, is ele’s continued citation of the Cherokee legal stuff, even though it is completely irrelevant to the topic, Cherokee is an LLC that makes risky investments, and a few fail, and the accounting is complex, and with that, an SEC settlement of $100,000 for an accounting error, with no finding of intention to defraud anyone, is SOP, and equivalent to me being fined $0.05. Yet to ele, this is “very interesting.”

I covered this first on Ele mental my dear, posted 5/18/2017 at 5:10 PM. So today I see another post from ele on the same topic. 5/18/2017 12:41 PM. Continue reading “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking”

The macaw is the official bird of Planet Rossi

I found the raw bird image first at Pet Yak.com. With apologies to Randi Jones. The modified image with Dottore Rossi peeking around the corner, and the bird-speech, was created by “Renzee,” according to Dewey Weaver, the infamous IH Fanatic. Rends? No, Stephenrenzz, May 17. 2016.

Endless eye candy, what a find! The mostly red birds appear to be red and green macaws. The bird in the middle is a Zen parrot, also known as a Hyacinth macaw.

The macaw is now the official bird of Planet Rossi. Be proud! The two species shown are endangered, as is Dottore Rossi.

Let’s not forget H. Ross Parrot, complete with American flag. And then there is the “ex-parrot scam.”

As well, any resemblance between Planet Rossi and the dead parrot sketch is purely coincidental. Purely. No resemblance, no.  Move along now, continue reading below. Continue reading “The macaw is the official bird of Planet Rossi”

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

ele wrote:

… Some facts to remember: Rossi was innocent. He has been cleared by all charges.

Petroldragon failed and was closed because he was unjustly jailed for about four years . Rossi was redounded by Italy.

Rossienglish. “Redounded” — to contribute greatly to, a person’s credit or honor. I’ve never seen the word used this way, though. “Innocent” is not a fact, it is a judgment. Nor is “cleared of all charges” a fact, it appears to be false. However, on Planet Rossi words take on special meanings that make RossiSays sort-of-true, if you squint and look sideways.

Perhaps doing the time for the crime clears the charges….

sigmoidal wrote:

Some commenters here claim that Dott. Rossi was fully acquitted and exhonerated [sic] of all charges related to PetrolDragon, despite being convicted in Italian court and serving jail time there.

I have never seen any evidence to support the notion that Dott. Rossi was ‘cleared’ of all charges, and it contradicts Mats Lewan’s account.

ele wrote:

sigmoidal wrote: [Some commenters here claim…]

In fact that is fully true. He was cleared and refunded .

sigmoidal wrote: [I have never seen any evidence … ]

Just ask the Italian Lawyer (another day another troll…. probably) to ask all the documents of the trials from Rossi’s lawyers .

So, great, want evidence? Ask an anonymous troll (if that’s what he is).

The Version of Rossi can be found here: http://ingandrearossi.net/

So the evidence supplied is RossiSays. However, even then, it doesn’t support what ele claimed, and, like Mats Lewan, actually contradicts it. From this page:

Of the 56 prosecutions, all those which led to his incarceration ended with sentences of acquittal. Only 5 indictments (for income tax evasion, as a consequence of the bankruptcy brought about by the closure of Omar and Petroldragon) ended with convictions, which were used to justify the lengthy period of preventive imprisonment linked to the accusations that had led to his arrests. All other judicial processes ended in acquittals.

Knowing how Rossi uses English in imprecise ways, and also because I remember something a little different, I checked Lewan (An Impossible Invention, pp. 62-63).

The details of the sentences against Rossi are difficult to verify, but my information is that he was sentenced to four years in prison, mostly for accounting fraud in connection with bankruptcies. He was also sentenced three times for environmental crimes….

In contrast, Rossi was never convicted of fraud. According to his lawyer, Andrea Ambiveri, four processes concerning criminal fraud were initiated but they all ended up being acquitted or that charges were dropped.

Of the 56 processes, five led to a conviction, according to Rossi, while in the other 51, he was finally acquitted or the case was time-barred. Time already served was deducted from the prison sentence. 

Someone is not “cleared of charges,” in the meaning of being found “innocent,” with reputation restored, if a case is dismissed because of a statute of limitations, one is “cleared” only in the sense of criminal prosecution and conviction becoming impossible. On appeal of certain cases, Rossi did win acquittal and reversal of fines, which may be what is talked about by “refunded,” but he did, in fact, spend time in jail for “accounting fraud,” which in a bankruptcy can be serious.

Rossi’s story is that all this was massively unfair, and perhaps it was, but Rossi also set himself up for this by how he conducted his business, rejecting the corporate support that could have allowed him to overcome hostile forces.

Steve Krivit has compiled references from Italian newspaper articles. I do not consider Krivit a reliable source, but there are many hints in the newspaper article titles or brief summaries that remind me of events and incidents coming out in Rossi v. Darden. Rossi plays business fast and loose.

ele wrote:

Eric Walker wrote:

I would not be surprised at all if the QuarkX technology, if it turns out to be a thing, is considered sufficiently derivative to be included. In that case if IH hold onto their license of Rossi’s IP, the QuarkX IP would presumably be theirs to make use of as well.

Probably yes.

But IH never prepared any Industrial Plan to exploit the technology.

Don’t you have to really exploit [and] industrially develop a technology to maintain the IP ?

In many agreements that is true.

IH did have a plan, perhaps ele should read those Ampenergo notes. Essentially, the plan was to confirm the technology transfer, showing that there was something practical, independent of Rossi’s presence, and then engage the big guys, the companies with billions to invest, in commercial roll-out. Because of Rossi’s inability or unwillingness to cooperate in creating that independent replication, of course, they never went further. But they did make devices per Rossi’s instructions, with some apparent success, and then found that, when tested more thoroughly than Rossi ever allowed, they didn’t work. Among Rossi’s inventions were test protocols and procedures that didn’t work.

Ele might claim that IH is lying, that is about the only refuge left. As pointed out by another on LF, faced with a choice to decide who is lying, someone who is shown beyond any reasonable doubt to have been lying, strongly and clearly, on many occasions, and someone where the only accusations of deliberate falsehood are vague and unclear, and where there are many examples of fulfilling on agreements (such as IH ending up paying Penon in spite of high doubt as to the probity of his report), a jury will almost certainly conclude that the habits continued in each case.

As to ele, above he lied about Rossi’s Italian history.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them