On LENR Forum, Wyttenbach demonstrates his clarity of memory and thought. Not.
(Update: Wyttenbach was banned for two days because of this.)
(Update again: Wyttenbach unbanned, based on allegedly poor English comprehension. This is a reason for lifting a relatively harmless two-day ban? If poor comprehension leads to offensive behavior, why is this then a reason to avoid a minor slap on the wrist, of no long-term consequence, when the behavior involved actually goes back a year or so.)
Gaseous emissions continue on LF, as usual, but then comes something completely different, an informative description, generally neutral. I’ll add some links and then blog comments, reserving the right to be crazy-as-hell (meshu) myself. After all, posts here are a blog (translate: fun!) and may be quite opinionated. Overall, CFC is intended to be neutral, but neutral-by-inclusion (like Wikiversity) not neutral-by-exclusion (like Wikipedia).
sigmoidal wrote: (an excellent post covering recent documents filed) Continue reading “More meshu and flabber on LF and then something completely different”
See It was an itsy-bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot error and Shanahan’s Folly, in Color, for some Shanahan sniffling and shuffling, but today I see Krivit making the usual ass of himself, even more obviously. As described before, Krivit asked Shanahan if he could explain a plot, and this is it:
Red and blue lines are from Krivit, the underlying chart is from this paper copied to NET, copied here as fair use for purposes of critique, as are other brief excerpts.
Ask Krivit notes (and acknowledges), Shanahan wrote a relatively thorough response. It’s one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen from Shanahan. He does give an explanation for the apparent anomaly, but obviously Krivit doesn’t understand it, so he changed the title of the post from “Kirk Shanahan, Can You Explain This?” to add “(He Couldn’t)”
Krivit was a wanna-be science journalist, but he ended up imagining himself to be expert, and commonly inserts his own judgments as if they are fact. “He couldn’t” obviously has a missing fact, that is, the standard of success in explanation: Krivit himself. If Krivit understands, then it has been explained. If he does not, not, and this could be interesting: obviously, Shanahan failed to communicate the explanation to Krivit (if we assume Krivit is not simply lying, and I do assume that). My headline here is a stupid, disempowering stand, that blames others for my own ignorance, but the empowering stand for a writer is to, in fact, take responsibility for the failure. If you don’t understand what I’m attempting to communicate, that’s my deficiency.
On the other hand, most LENR scientists have stopped talking with Krivit, because he has so often twisted what they write like this.
Krivit presents Shanahan’s “attempted” explanation, so I will quote it here, adding comments and links as may be helfpul. However, Krivit also omitted part of the explanation, believing it irrelevant. Since he doesn’t understand, his assessment of relevance may be defective. Shanahan covers this on LENR Forum. I will restore those paragraphs. I also add Krivit’s comments.
1. First a recap. The Figure you chose to present is the first figure from F&P’s 1993 paper on their calorimetric method. It’s overall notable feature is the saw-tooth shape it takes, on a 1-day period. This is due to the use of an open cell which allows electrolysis gases to escape and thus the liquid level in the electrolysis cell drops. This changes the electrolyte concentration, which changes the cell resistance, which changes the power deposited via the standard Ohm’s Law relations, V= I*R and P=V*I (which gives P=I^2*R). On a periodic basis, F&P add makeup D2O to the cell, which reverses the concentration changes thus ‘resetting’ the resistance and voltage related curves.
This appears to be completely correct and accurate. In this case, unlike some Pons and Fleischmann plots, there are no calibration pulses, where a small amount of power is injected through a calibration resistor to test the cell response to “excess power.” We are only seeing, in the sawtooth behavior, the effect of abruptly adding pure D2O.
Krivit: Paragraph 1: I am in agreement with your description of the cell behavior as reflected in the sawtooth pattern. We are both aware that that is a normal condition of electrolyte replenishment. As we both know, the reported anomaly is the overall steady trend of the temperature rise, concurrent with the overall trend of the power decrease.
Voltage, not power, though, in fact, because of the constant current, input voltage will be proportional to power. Krivit calls this an “anomaly,” which simply means something unexplained. It seems that Krivit believes that temperature should vary with power, which it would with a purely resistive heater. This cell isn’t that.
2. Note that Ohm’s Law is for an ‘ideal’ case, and the real world rarely behaves perfectly ideally, especially at the less than 1% level. So we expect some level of deviation from ideal when we look at the situation closely. However, just looking at the temperature plot we can easily see that the temperature excursions in the Figure change on Day 5. I estimate the drop on Day 3 was 0.6 degrees, Day 4 was 0.7, Day 5 was 0.4 and Day 6 was 0.3 (although it may be larger if it happened to be cut off). This indicates some significant change (may have) occurred between the first 2 and second 2 day periods. It is important to understand the scale we are discussing here. These deviations represent maximally a (100*0.7/303=) 0.23% change. This is extremely small and therefore _very_ difficult to pin to a given cause.
Again, this appears accurate. Shanahan is looking at what was presented and noting various characteristics that might possibly be relevant. He is proceeding here as a scientific skeptic would proceed. For a fuller analysis, we’d actually want to see the data itself, and to study the source paper more deeply. What is the temperature precision? The current is constant, so we would expect, absent a chemical anomaly, loss of D2O as deuterium and oxygen gas to be constant, but if there is some level of recombination, that loss would be reduced, and so the replacement addition would be less, assuming it is replaced to restore the same level.
Krivit: Paragraph 2: This is a granular analysis of the daily temperature changes. I do not see any explanation for the anomaly in this paragraph.
It’s related; in any case, Shanahan is approaching this as scientist, when it seems Krivit is expecting polemic. This gets very clear in the next paragraph.
3. I also note that the voltage drops follow a slightly different pattern. I estimate the drops are 0.1, .04, .04, .02 V. The first drop may be artificially influenced by the fact that it seems to be the very beginning of the recorded data. However, the break noted with the temperatures does not occur in the voltages, instead the break may be on the next day, but more data would be needed to confirm that. Thus we are seeing either natural variation or process lags affecting the temporal correlation of the data.
Well, temporal correlation is quite obvious. So far, Shanahan has not come to an explanation for the trend, but he is, again, proceeding as a scientist and a genuine skeptic. (For a pseudoskeptic, it is Verdict first (The explanation! Bogus!) and Trial later (then presented as proof rather than as investigation).
Paragraph 3: This is a granular analysis of the daily voltage changes. I note your use of the unconfident phrase “may be” twice. I do not see any explanation for the anomaly in this paragraph.
Shanahan appropriately uses “may be” to refer to speculations which may or may not be relevant. Krivit is looking for something that no scientist would give him, who is actually practicing science. We do not know the ultimate explanation of what Pons and Fleischmann reported here, so confidence, the kind of certainty Krivit is looking for, would only be a mark of foolishness.
4. I also note that in the last day’s voltage trace there is a ‘glitch’ where the voltage take a dip and changes to a new level with no corresponding change in cell temp. This is a ‘fact of the data’ which indicates there are things that can affect the voltage but not the temperature, which violates our idea of the ideal Ohmic Law case. But we expected that because we are dealing with such small changes.
This is very speculative. I don’t like to look at data at the termination, maybe they simply shut off the experiment at that point, and there is, I see, a small voltage rise, close to noise. This tells us less than Shanahn implies. The variation in magnitude of the voltage rise, however, does lead to some reasonable suspicion and wonder as to what is going on. At first glance, it appears correlated with the variation in temperature rise. Both of those would be correlated with the amount of make-up heavy water added to restore level.
Krivit: Paragraph 4: You mention what you call a glitch, in the last day’s voltage trace. It is difficult for me to see what you are referring to, though I do note again, that you are using conditional language when you write that there are things that “can affect” voltage. So this paragraph, as well, does not appear to provide any explanation for the anomaly. Also in this paragraph, you appear to suggest that there are more-ideal cases of Ohm’s law and less-ideal cases. I’m unwilling to consider that Ohm’s law, or any accepted law of science, is situational.
Krivit is flat-out unqualified to write about science. It’s totally obvious here. He is showing that, while he’s been reading reports on cold fusion calorimetry for well over fifteen years, he has not understood them. Krivit has heard it now from Shanahan, actually confirmed by Miles (see below), “Joule heating ” also called “Ohmic heating,” the heating that is the product of current and voltage, is not the only source of heat in an electrolytic cell.
Generally, all “accepted laws of science” are “situational.” We need to understand context to apply them.
To be sure, I also don’t understand what Shanahan was referring to in this paragraph. I don’t see it in the plot. So perhaps Shanahan will explain. (He may comment below, and I’d be happy to give him guest author privileges, as long as it generates value or at least does not cause harm.)
5. Baseline noise is substantially smaller than these numbers, and I can make no comments on anything about it.
Yes. The voltage noise seems to be more than 10 mV. A constant-current power supply (which adjusts voltage to keep the current constant) was apparently set at 400 mA, and those supplies typically have a bandwidth of well in excess of 100 kHz, as I recall. So, assuming precise voltage measurements (which would be normal), there is noise, and I’d want to know how the data was translated to plot points. Bubble noise will cause variations, and these cells are typically bubbling (that is part of the FP approach, to ensure stirring so that temperature is even in the cell). If the data is simply recorded periodically, instead of being smoothed by averaging over an adequate period, it could look noisier than it actually is (bubble noise being reasonably averaged out over a short period). A 10 mV variation in voltage, at the current used, corresponds to 4 mW variation. Fleischmann calorimetry has a reputed precision of 0.1 mW. That uses data from rate of change to compute instantaneous power, rather than waiting for conditions to settle. We are not seeing that here, but we might be seeing the result of it in the reported excess power figures.
Krivit: Paragraph 5: You make a comment here about noise.
What is Krivit’s purpose here? Why did he ask the question? Does he actually want to learn something? I found the comment about noise to be interesting, or at least to raise an issue of interest.
6. Your point in adding the arrows to the Figure seems to be that the voltage is drifting down overall, so power in should be drifting down also (given constant current operation). Instead the cell temperature seem to be drifting up, perhaps indicating an ‘excess’ or unknown heat source. F&P report in the Fig. caption that the calculated daily excess heats are 45, 66, 86, and 115 milliwatts. (I wonder if the latter number is somewhat influenced by the ‘glitch’ or whatever caused it.) Note that a 45 mW excess heat implies a 0.1125V change (P=V*I, I= constant 0.4A), and we see that the observed voltage changes are too small and in the wrong direction, which would indicate to me that the temperatures are used to compute the supposed excesses. The derivation of these excess heats requires a calibration equation to be used, and I have commented on some specific flaws of the F&P method and on the fact that it is susceptible to the CCS problem previously. The F&P methodology lumps _any_ anomaly into the ‘apparent excess heat’ term of the calorimetric equation. The mistake is to assign _all_ of this term to some LENR. (This was particularly true for the HAD event claimed in the 1993 paper.)
So Shanahan gives the first explanation, (“excess heat,” or heat of unknown origin). Calculated excess heat is increasing, and with the experimental approach here, excess heat would cause the temperature to rise.
His complaint about assigning all anomalous heat (“apparent excess heat”) to LENR is … off. Basically excess heat means a heat anomaly, and it certainly does not mean “LENR.” That is, absent other evidence, a speculative conclusion, based on circumstantial evidence (unexplained heat). There is no mistake here. Pons and Fleischmann did not call the excess heat LENR and did not mention nuclear reactions.
Shanahan has then, here, identified another possible explanation, his misnamed “CCS” problem. It’s very clear that the name has confused those whom Shanahan might most want to reach: LENR experimentalists. The actual phenomenon that he would be suggesting here is unexpected recombination at the cathode. That is core to Shanahan’s theory as it applies to open cells with this kind of design. It would raise the temperature if it occurs.
LENR researchers claim that the levels of recombination are very low, and a full study of this topic is beyond this relatively brief post. Suffice it to say for now that recombination is a possible explanation, even if it is not proven. (And when we are dealing with anomalies, we cannot reject a hypothesis because it is unexpected. Anomaly means “unexpected.”)
Krivit: Paragraph 6: You analyze the reported daily excess heat measurements as described in the Fleischmann-Pons paper. I was very specific in my question. I challenged you to explain the apparent violation of Ohm’s law. I did not challenge you to explain any reported excess heat measurements or any calorimetry. Readings of cell temperature are not calorimetry, but certainly can be used as part of calorimetry.
Actually, Krivit did not ask that question. He simply asked Shanahan to explain the plot. He thinks a violation of Ohm’s law is apparent. It’s not, for several reasons. For starters, wrong law. Ohm’s law is simply that the current through a conductor is proportional to the voltage across it. The ratio is the conductance, usually expressed by its reciprocal, the resistance.
From the Wikipedia article: “An element (resistor or conductor) that behaves according to Ohm’s law over some operating range is referred to as an ohmic device (or an ohmic resistor) because Ohm’s law and a single value for the resistance suffice to describe the behavior of the device over that range. Ohm’s law holds for circuits containing only resistive elements (no capacitances or inductances) for all forms of driving voltage or current, regardless of whether the driving voltage or current is constant (DC) or time-varying such as AC. At any instant of time Ohm’s law is valid for such circuits.”
An electrolytic cell is not an ohmic device. What is true here is that one might immediately expect that heating in the cell would vary with the input power, but that is only by neglecting other contributions, and what Shanahan is pointing out by pointing out the small levels of the effect is that there are many possible conditions that could affect this.
With his tendentious reaction, Krivit ignores the two answers given in Shanahan’s paragraph, or, more accurately, Shanahan gives a primary answer and then a possible explanation. The primary answer is some anomalous heat. The possible explanation is a recombination anomaly. It is still an anomaly, something unexpected.
7. Using an average cell voltage of 5V and the current of 0.4A as specified in the Figure caption (Pin~=2W), these heats translate to approximately 2.23, 3.3, 4.3, and 7.25% of input. Miles has reported recombination in his cells on the same order of magnitude. Thus we would need measures of recombination with accuracy and precision levels on the order of 1% to distinguish if these supposed excess heats are recombination based or not _assuming_ the recombination process does nothing but add heat to the cell. This may not be true if the recombination is ATER (at-the-electrode-recombination). As I’ve mentioned in lenr-forum recently, the 6.5% excess reported by Szpak, et al, in 2004 is more likely on the order of 10%, so we need a _much_ better way to measure recombination in order to calculate its contribution to the apparent excess heat.
I think Shanahan may be overestimating the power of his own arguments, from my unverified recollection, but this is simply exploring the recombination hypothesis, which is, in fact, an explanation, and if our concern is possible nuclear heat, then this is a possible non-nuclear explanation for some anomalous heat in some experiments. In quick summary: a non-nuclear artifact, unexpected recombination, and unless recombination is measured, and with some precision, it cannot be ruled out merely because experts say it wouldn’t happen. Data is required. For the future, I hope we look at all this more closely here on CFC.net.
Shanahan has not completely explored this. Generally, at constant current and after the cathode loading reaches equilibrium, there should be constant gas evolution. However, unexpected recombination in an open cell like this, with no recombiner, would lower the amount of gas being released, and therefore the necessary replenishment amount. This is consistent with the decline that can be inferred as an explanation from the voltage jumps. Less added D2O, lower effect.
There would be another effect from salts escaping the cell, entrained in microdroplets, which would cause a long-term trend of increase in voltage, the opposite of what we see.
So the simple explanation here, confirmed by the calorimetry, is that anomalous heat is being released, and then there are two explanations proposed for the anomaly: a LENR anomaly or a recombination anomaly. Shanahan is correct that precise measurement of recombination (which might not happen under all conditions and which, like LENR heat, might be chaotic and not accurately predictable).
Excess nuclear heat will, however, likely be correlated with a nuclear ash (like helium) and excess recombination heat would be correlated with reduction in offgas, so these are testable. It is, again, beyond the scope of this comment to explore that.
Krivit. Paragraph 7: You discuss calorimetry.
Krivit misses that Shanahan discusses ATER, “At The Electrode Recombination,” which is Shanahan’s general theory as applied to this cell. Shanahan points to various possibilities to explain the plot (not the “apparent violation of Ohm’s law,” which was just dumb), but the one that is classic Shanahan is ATER, and, frankly, I see evidence in the plot that he may be correct as to this cell at this time, and no evidence that I’ve noticed so far in the FP article to contradict it.
(Remember, ATER is an anomaly itself, i.e., very much not expected. The mechanism would be oxygen bubbles reaching the cathode, where they would immediately oxidize available deuterium. So when I say that I don’t see anything in the article, I’m being very specific. I am not claiming that this actually happened.)
8. This summarizes what we can get from the Figure. Let’s consider what else might be going on in addition to electrolysis and electrolyte replenishment. There are several chemical/physical processes ongoing that are relevant that are often not discussed. For example: dissolution of electrode materials and deposition of them elsewhere, entrainment, structural changes in the Pd, isotopic contamination, chemical modification of the electrode surfaces, and probably others I haven’t thought of at this point.
Well, some get rather Rube Goldberg and won’t be considered unless specific evidence pops up.
Krivit: Paragraph 8: You offer random speculations of other activities that might be going on inside the cell.
Indeed he does, though “random” is not necessarily accurate. He was asked to explain a chart, so he is thinking of things that might, under some conditions or others, explain the behavior shown. His answer is directly to the question, but Krivit lives in a fog, steps all over others, impugns the integrity of professional scientists, writes “confident” claims that are utterly bogus, and then concludes that anyone who points this out is a “believer” in something or other nonsense. He needs an editor and psychotherapist. Maybe she’ll come back if he’s really nice. Nah. That almost never happens. Sorry.
But taking responsibility for what one has done, that’s the path to a future worth living into.
9. All except the entrainment issue can result in electrode surface changes which in turn can affect the overvoltage experienced in the cell. That in turn affects the amount of voltage available to heat the electrolyte. In other words, I believe the correct, real world equation is Vcell = VOhm + Vtherm + Vover + other. (You will recall that the F&P calorimetric model only assumes VOhm and Vtherm are important.) It doesn’t take much change to induce a 0.2-0.5% change in T. Furthermore most of the significant changing is going to occur in the first few days of cell operation, which is when the Pd electrode is slowly loaded to the high levels typical in an electrochemical setup. This assumes the observed changes in T come from a change in the electrochemical condition of the cell. They might just be from changes in the TCs (or thermistors or whatever) from use.
What appears to me, here, is that Shanahan is artificially separating out Vover from the other terms. I have not reviewed this, so I could be off here, rather easily. Shanahan does not explain these terms here, so it is perhaps unsurprising that Krivit doesn’t understand, or if he does, he doesn’t show it.
An obvious departure from Ohm’s law and expected heat from electrolytic power is that some of the power available to the cell, which is the product of total cell voltage and current, ends up as a rate of production of chemical potential energy. The FP paper assumes that gas is being evolved and leaving the cell at a rate that corresponds to the current. It does not consider recombination that I’ve seen.
Krivit: Paragraphs 9-10: You consider entrainment, but you don’t say how this explains the anomaly.
It is a trick question. By definition, an explained anomaly is not an anomaly. Until and unless an explanation, a mechanism, is confirmed through controlled experiment (and with something like this, multiply-confirmed, specifically, not merely generally), a proposals are tentative, and Shanahan’s general position — which I don’t see that he has communicated very effectively — is that there is an anomaly. He merely suggests that it might be non-nuclear. It is still unexpected, and why some prefer to gore the electrochemists rather than the nuclear physicists is a bit of a puzzle to me, except it seems the latter have more money. Feynman thought that the arrogance of physicists was just that, arrogance. Shanahan says that entrainment would be important to ATER, but I don’t see how. Rather, it would be another possible anomaly. Again, perhaps Shanahan will explain this.
10. Entrainment losses would affect the cell by removing the chemicals dissolved in the water. This results in a concentration change in the electrolyte, which in turn changes the cell resistance. This doesn’t seem to be much of an issue in this Figure, but it certainly can become important during ATER.
This was, then, off-topic for the question, perhaps. But Shanahan has answered the question, as well as it can be answered, given the known science and status of this work. Excess heat levels as shown here (which is not clear from the plot, by the way) are low enough that we cannot be sure that this is the “Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect.” The article itself is talking about a much clearer demonstration; the plot is shown as a little piece considered of interest. I call it an “indication.”
The mere miniscule increase in heat over days, vs. a small decrease in voltage, doesn’t show more than that.
[Paragraphs not directly addressing this measurement removed.]
In fact, Shanahan recapped his answer toward the end of what Krivit removed. Obviously, Krivit was not looking for an answer, but, I suspect, to make some kind of point, abusing Shanahan’s good will. Even though he thanks him. Perhaps this is about the Swedish scientist’s comment (see the NET article), which was, ah, not a decent explanation, to say the least. Okay, this is a blog. It was bullshit. I don’t wonder that Krivit wasn’t satisfied. Is there something about the Swedes? (That is not what I’d expect, by the way, I’m just noticing a series of Swedish scientists who have gotten involved with cold fusion who don’t know their fiske from their fysik.
And here are those paragraphs:
I am not an electrochemist so I can be corrected on these points (but not by vacuous hand-waving, only by real data from real studies) but it seems clear to me that the data presented is from a time frame where changes are expected to show up and that the changes observed indicate both correlated effects in T and V as well as uncorrelated ones. All that adds up to the need for replication if one is to draw anything from this type of data, and I note that usually the initial loading period is ignored by most researchers for the same reason I ‘activate’ my Pd samples in my experiments – the initial phases of the research are difficult to control but much easier to control later on when conditions have been stabilized.
To claim the production of excess heat from this data alone is not a reasonable claim. All the processes noted above would allow for slight drifts in the steady state condition due to chemical changes in the electrodes and electrolyte. As I have noted many, many times, a change in steady state means one needs to recalibrate. This is illustrated in Ed Storms’ ICCF8 report on his Pt-Pt work that I used to develop my ATER/CCS proposal by the difference in calibration constants over time. Also, Miles has reported calibration constant variation on the order of 1-2% as well, although it is unclear whether the variation contains systematic character or not (it is expressed as random variation). What is needed (as always) is replication of the effect in such a manner as to demonstrate control over the putative excess heat. To my knowledge, no one has done that yet.
So, those are my quick thoughts on the value of F&P’s Figure 1. Let me wrap this up in a paragraph.
The baseline drift presented in the Figure and interpreted as ‘excess heat’ can easily be interpreted as chemical effects. This is especially true given that the data seems to be from the very first few days of cell operation, where significant changes in the Pd electrode in particular are expected. The magnitudes of the reported excess heats are of the size that might even be attributed to the CF-community-favored electrochemical recombination. It’s not even clear that this drift is not just equipment related. As is usual with reports in this field, more information, and especially more replication, is needed if there is to be any hope of deriving solid conclusions regarding the existence of excess heat from this type of data.”
And then, back to what Krivit quoted:
I readily admit I make mistakes, so if you see one, let me know. But I believe the preceding to be generically correct.
Kirk Shanahan
Physical Chemist
U.S. Department of Energy, Savannah River National Laboratory
Krivit responds:
Although you have offered a lot of information, for which I’m grateful, I am unable to locate in your letter any definitive, let alone probable conventional explanation as to why the overall steady trend of increasing heat and decreasing power occurs, violating Ohm’s law, unless there is a source of heat in the cell. The authors of the paper claim that the result provides evidence of a source of heating in the cell. As I understand, you deny that this result provides such evidence.
Shanahan directly answered the question, about as well as it can be answered at this time. He allows “anomalous heat” — which covers the CMNS community common opinion, because this must include the nuclear possibility, then offers an alternate unconventional anomaly, ATER, and then a few miscellaneous minor possibilities.
Krivit is looking for a definitive answer, apparently, and holds on to the idea that the cell may be “violating Ohm’s law,” when it has been explained to him (by two:Shanahan and Miles) that Ohm’s law is inadequate to describe electrolytic cell behavior, because of the chemical shifts. While it may be harmless, much more than Ohm’s law is involved in analyzing electrochemistry. “Ohmic heating” is, as Shanahan pointed out — and as is also well known — is an element of an analysis, not the whole analysis. There is also chemistry and endothermic and exothermic reaction. Generating deuterium and oxygen from heavy water is endothermic. The entry of deuterium into the cathode is exothermic, at least at modest loading. Recombination of oxygen and deuterium is exothermic, whereas release of deuterium from the cathode is endothermic. Krivit refers to voltage as if it were power, and then as if the heating of the cell would be expected to match this power. Because this cell is constant current, the overall cell input power does vary directly with the voltage. However, only some of this power ends up as heat (and Ohm’s law simply does not cover that).
Actually, Shanahan generally suggests a “source of heating in the cells” (unexpected recombination). He then presents other explanations as well. If recombination shifts the location of generated heat, this could affect calorimetry, Shahanan calls this Calibration Constant Shift, but that is easily misunderstood, and confused with another phenomenon, shifts in calibration constant from other changes, including thermistor or thermocouple aging (which he mentions). Shanahan did answer the question, albeit mixed with other comments, so Krivit’s “He Couldn’t” was not only rude, but wrong.
Then Krivit answered the paragraphs point-by-point, and I’ve put those comments above.
And then Krivit added, at the end:
This concludes my discussion of this matter with you.
I find this appalling, but it’s what we have come to expect from Krivit, unfortunately. Shanahan wrote a polite attempt to answer Krivit’s question (which did look like a challenge). I’ve experienced Krivit shutting down conversation like that, abruptly, with what, in person, would be socially unacceptable. It’s demanding the “Last Word.”
Krivit also puts up an unfortunate comment from Miles. Miles misunderstands what is happening and thinks, apparently, that the “Ohm’s Law” interpretation belongs to Shanahan, when it was Krivit. Shananan is not a full-blown expert on electrochemistry — like Miles is — but would probably agree with Miles, I certainly don’t see a conflict between them on this issue. And Krivit doesn’t see this, doesn’t understand what is happening right in his own blog, that misunderstanding.
However, one good thing: Krivit’s challenge did move Shanahan to write something decent. I appreciate that. Maybe some good will come out of it. I got to notice the similarity between fysik and fiske, that could be useful.
I intended to give the actual physical law that would appear to be violated, but didn’t. It’s not Ohm’s law, which simply doesn’t apply, the law in question is conservation of energy or the first law of thermodynamics. Hess’s law is related. As to apparent violation, this appears by neglecting the role of gas evolution; unexpected recombination within the cell would cause additional heating. While it is true that this energy comes, ultimately, from input energy, that input energy may be stored in the cell earlier as absorbed deuterium, and this may be later released. The extreme of this would be “heat after death” (HAD), i.e., heat evolved after input power goes to zero, which skeptics have attributed to the “cigarette lighter effect,” see Close.
(And this is not the place to debate HAD, but the cigarette lighter effect as an explanation has some serious problems, notably lack of sufficient oxygen, with flow being, from deuterium release, entirely out of the cell, not allowing oxygen to be sucked back in. This release does increase with temperature, and it is endothermic, overall. It is only net exothermic if recombination occurs.)
(And possible energy storage is why we would be interested to see the full history of cell operation, not just a later period. In the chart in question, we only see data from the third through seventh days, and we do not see data for the initial loading (which should show storage of energy, i.e., endothermy). The simple-minded Krivit thinking is utterly off-point. Pons and Fleischmann are not standing on this particular result, and show it as a piece of eye candy with a suggestive comment at the beginning of their paper. I do not find, in general, this paper to be particularly convincing without extensive analysis. It is an example of how “simplicity” is subjective. By this time, cold fusion needed an APCO — or lawyers, dealing with public perceptions. Instead, the only professionalism that might have been involved was on the part of the American Physical Society and Robert Park. I would not have suggested that Pons and Fleischmann not publish, but that their publications be reviewed and edited for clear educational argument in the real-world context, not merely scientific accuracy.)
When I can’t make up new words any more, shovel dirt in my face. This one is easy, though, a rather obvious back-formation.
The occasion is the reaction on LENR Forum to new filings related to the Motions in Limine. For those who need a program, these are motions seeking to exclude evidence as improper,perhaps likely to emotionally (and irrelevantly or deceptively) bias a jury, or as spoliated, i.e., damaged through deliberate action or carelessness when care was due.
I’ll start with a post just before the docs hit the fan, IH Fanboy wrote:
@Shane,
Yeah, I agree that JMP/Rossi are for most purposes (although not technically) one and the same.
What is interesting to me is sig mentioned a lease agreement, and that he had seen it. That is new information, at least to me. And how did he gain access to it? Inquiring minds want to know, and all that.
IHFB is more or less unique on Planet Rossi in that he does acknowledge the “customer fraud.” In a new document that IHFB has not seen yet, evidence is emphasized that countersinks the screws. (None of it is particularly new, we just see a little more of the JM/JMC/JMP negotiation) that makes the “Johnson Matthey” fraud totally clear, and Rossi’s later claims about it as probable perjury. IH does not here assert all the evidence that has been shown. For example, Bass saying to Rossi that he’s not clear how to answer questions about Johnson Matthey. Where did he get the idea that Johnson Matthey was involved? He clearly has the idea that the Doral operation is a Johnson Matthey operation.
However, I don’t think IHFB is familiar with the case documents. Frankly, that’s quite understandable. I’m spending many hours a week sorting and organizing document access, and I don’t consider myself thoroughly familiar, merely more than the average bear. Continue reading “Planet Rossi Flabbergas”
There are flurries of posts on LENR Forum about a potential error in measuring 3-phase power, and this post caught my attention:
Reversing a clamp, for example on I1 inverts the polarity of I1
This is usual absurdity that have been heard many times.
AC current have no defined polarity ( is in AC !) so if you reverse a clamp the instrument will detect a 180 phase shift of the current but the power calculation will remain the same !
All your formulas are wrong.
Start reading e.g. http://www.engineeringtoolbox.…ase-electrical-d_888.html
This is one more piece of circumstantial evidence that ele is Rossi. Continue reading “Fun with Phase, and Going With the Flow”
This is just too funny to pass up. On LENR Forum, Zeus46 wrote:
I used to know an old doctor, now dead, who actually met and treated Papp for [redacted]. He said Papp was a flaming nut case (not his words– he said [redacted]).
Some interesting bits and pieces from California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act:
“CMIA prohibits a health care provider, health care service plan, or contractor from disclosing medical information regarding a patient, enrollee, or subscriber without first obtaining an authorization, except as specified.”
Note: I have redacted the medical information. (Not entirely, a doctor who treats someone and calls him a “flaming nut case,” would probably be violating HIPPA and CMIA, and repeating this could still be a violation.) I’m not a California resident, but just to make the point. CMIA prohibits any person from releasing private medical information, not only the providers listed. There are sources warning the media, for example, about publishing such information without permission. I’m reminded of the physician who accessed the medical information, particularly death certificate information, for Atkins, the cardiologist who developed the Atkins Diet, and then released it for political purposes (and it was misleading).
Zeus46 went on to quote many relevant regulations and issues. Without doing extensive legal research myself, it looks like, on the face, the regulations set up sanctions for physicians, in particular, but also some other individuals or entities, for disclosing information similar to what maryyugo has posted.
It is possible that the original disclosure by Papp’s doctor was not a violation of regulations at the time, but this does not excuse maryyugo from the present violation. It is obvious to me that Zeus46 knows the real-life identity of maryyugo, it is not difficult to find, since he outed himself years ago, but continued using the “anonymous” identity. The real person, I’d give it more than 99% probability, is a physician licensed in California.
It appears that “Mary” is so eager to present classic debunkery, and so eager to prove it with “evidence,” that he completely ignores legal risk from his profession.
Zeus46 did not actually reveal that maryyugo is a physician, so he did not violate LENR Forum rules against outing or doxxing.
I had assumed, as did others, that the CMIA rules applied to health care providers. They do, but they also apply to everyone. From LENR Forum:
I’m surprised you can put your clothes on by yourself in the morning. You can, can’t you? PS: dead people can’t sue for damages nor can anyone on the behalf. Not to mention that I am not releasing any of Papp’s sordid records because I never saw any. I am not even reporting facts about Papp! I am simply reporting an anecdote about what someone told me. Hear say. Also you seem to have lost track and wandered into the wrong thread. Anyway sue me. Give it a try. I am terrified.
FWIW, Abd’s comment on this related not to anyone suing you (ridiculous) but to professional disciplinary action for which no doubt the rules are different. However, I have no idea what is your profession, nor any of the details here, so what he suggested remains for me highly speculative.
I would assume that Zeus46 knows Mary Yugo’s identity. It is trivial to find. I have confirmed the identity and “Mary” has revealed, at various times, personal history that matches that of the identified person. One will see people, in various fora, calling Mary by the real name. Mary denies it, but the real person could trivially torpedo this, if different.
I was concerned that the comment here might not be from Mary, but could be a troll. This has definitely happened in the past. So I checked. The information I have as admin here is consistent with the known identification; more than that I will not say. Absent necessity, I will respect user rights.
Mary Yugo is a licensed physician living in California. He has a history of debunking (and has done real investigation, qualifying him as a skeptic in some cases). However, he is also highly opinionated and knee-jerk contemptuous of others who might be pointing something out that he does not understand, and this sequence shows it.
The risk is low, but Mary has not understood the risk. I do not know how CMIA is enforced, there might be no precedent, but the situation Mary describes is of a physician treating Papp revealing what would now be illegal to reveal (I don’t know about then). According to Mary, that physician is deceased, but CMIA also prohibits any person from revealing such information. And any person may file a report. If there are no provable actual damages, the potential fine is limited to $2500.
Mary claims it’s “hearsay.” Yes, it is. Hearsay about medical information, and it is contrary to CMIA regulations to repeat that. Theoretically, to anyone. So far, the walls don’t have ears, and in a case like this, my guess is that the courts would rule that CMIA does not trump ordinary freedom of private speech. But this was not private speech.
It was also unnecessary and irrelevant in context. Mary is a gossip.
There are resemblances, to be sure, between Papp and Rossi. And as to what is involved here, an alleged physician’s diagnosis, that merely demonstrates what was already known: Papp was not necessarily, himself, a reliable witness, and from the submarine incident, may have been capable of staging an elaborate fraud. The diagnosis, however, does not show that the Papp engines did not work, and from what I’ve seen, there is sufficient evidence that they did, in fact, work, to keep this affair in the realm of mystery. Mallove wrote an extensive article on this, and I consider some of his expressed opinions there unfortunate and not yet supported by reliable evidence, but … there are some things that we may never know. Or maybe the “Papp effect” will be confirmed in some way. What I have seen in this line is quite unconvincing.
We also know, then, that Rossi is an unreliable witness and is capable of arranging an elaborate fraud (the fake customer!). We know that Rossi was accused of various frauds in Italy; the ultimate disposition of all that remains a bit unclear to me. Rossi has claimed that all charges were dismissed and all fines refunded, but I have not seen that conclusion from any independent investigator. However, all that does not demonstrate that there is no Rossi Effect.
One statement that IH has made has raised concern for me. From the joint stipulation, IH introduces their “Statement of the Case” with:
Plaintiffs claim to have invented a technology called the “E-Cat” capable of violating the law of conservation of energy by producing far more energy than it consumes.
First of all, the plaintiffs do not claim that the E-Cat is capable of “violating the law of conservation of energy,” and the concept of “consuming” energy is scientifically defective. What is referred to is input energy, and, yes, it is claimed that the E-Cat generates more heat than could be produced by input energy. However, this does not violate conservation of energy if there is a fuel.
As a trivial example, it takes energy to detonate a stick of dynamite, but there is no violation of energy conservation just because the explosion releases far more heat than is generated by the blasting cap that triggers it. Energy “input” must include the potential energy of all system components.
Rossi did not originally provide any theoretical basis for his claims, but he was generally working with LENR, so the general claim would be that there is a nuclear transformation releasing the energy.
If the Industrial Heat investors did not think this possible, without violating conservation of energy, they had no business investing in such a claim. It sometimes occurs that skeptics dismiss LENR as involving “perpetual motion machines.” It would not be that. The energy available from a nuclear fuel is limited. It is not “free energy.” It would not be “perpetual.”
That introductory comment was just plain wrong, because Rossi doesn’t make that claim, and a working Rossi device would not violate conservation of energy. Conservation of energy is an aspect of the first law of thermodynamics, and the IH experts have pointed to violations, but that was in the testing, as to the behavior of steam, not about the claimed effect itself, which would presumably be nuclear in origin. Have the attorneys misunderstood?
If possible, this should be corrected. LENR should not be on trial in Florida.
A comment today pointed out a post by kirkshanahan on LENR-Forum.
KShanahan. What’s that story about the time you were trying to dispute some ‘cold fusion’ findings by showing a non-correlation between two factors, but ballsed up the analysis, and ended up unknowingly proving it? Or something. Abd used to write about it. Never heard your side of it. Maybe something about a horizontal line on a graph?
In my 2010 J. Env. Monitoring paper, there is a slight error in my discussion
of a specific figure. Abd has tried to use that to discredit everything I write
in a ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ style. I replied to him here on
lenr-forum, but in brief… Continue reading “It was an itsy-bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot error”
On LENR Forum, kirkshanahan wrote:
It seems Krivit has issued me a challenge (Kirk Shanahan, Can You Explain This?) but provided no way to respond. So I’ll do it here…
My first answer is: Probably, what exactly do you need explained?
That was, of course, a direct answer to Krivit’s actual question. The post is undated, but it’s the latest “Recent News Article” at this point.
Krivit takes Fig. 1 from 1993Fleischmann-Pons-PLA-Simplicity and adds some lines to it to make the displayed figure.
And Fleischmann asks the question himself:
One can therefore pose the question: “How can it be that the temperature of the cell contents increases whereas the enthalpy input decreases with time. 9” Our answer to this dilemma naturally has been: “There is a source of enthalpy in the cells whose strength increases with time.” At a more quantitative level one sees that the magnitudes of these sources are such that explanations in terms of chemical changes must be excluded.
But Krivit is asking the question of Shanahan. Why? Slow news day? We know that Shanahan has alternative explanations, and most LENR researchers and students have rejected them, but what could be useful is a detailed and careful examination of them. Krivit refers in an update to Shanahan’s response, but it is more or less as expected, and Krivit does not address the issues.
Apparently he is unable to understand why the temperature can increase and the voltage decrease over time in the cell without excess energy from LENR being the cause.
For starters, Krivit refers to the plot of voltage as if it is a plot of power input. He’s not incorrect, because the experiment is likely constant current, in which case power will track voltage, but simply showing a voltage plot will not communicate that to a reader. There are also issues of possible bubble noise that could cause an error in measuring power. That has been addressed to my own satisfaction, but the point is that the matter is not as simple as Krivit imagines. To him, that plot would be a proof — proof, I tell you — of LENR. But it’s not going to convince any skeptic, without serious study. And I haven’t seen any converts from that plot. Shanahan went on:
I would suggest he read the section of my whitepaper discussing the flaws in the F&P calorimetric method. THH conveniently posted a link (Mar 2nd 2017 post #92 in thread “Validity of LENR Science…[split]” “Kirk’s white paper answering Marwan et al: https://drive.google.com/file/…b1doPc3otVGFUNDZKUDQ/view) to it. Then think it through while chanting “CCS CCS CCS”.
Kirk does not know how to make links work. When text is copied, as he did, the link may look like a link, but it’s been munged with those ellipses in the middle. It is one of the little joys of LF software. Rather, follow the link and then copy the full URL from the browser bar. Shanahan also could have copied the link to that post 92, the date stamp is a link that can be copied. That’s what I do. The post number is also a link.
Here is his white paper.
BTW, there are other reasons besides ATER/CCS for this as well (and I suspect the cause of the drift shown in the Figure is actually not ATER, that comes later in the paper). Ask an electrochemist.
Shanahan has never successfully shown actual flaws in the Fleischmann calorimetry; rather, he has alternate hypotheses, unconfirmed. However, this could deserve careful discussion here. The LF style sequential commentary doesn’t lead anywhere but to useless smoke.
We have to assume constant current for the discussion to make sense. Fleischmann doesn’t actually say that the input is from a constant current supply, but gives the current as 400 mA.
Krivit responded to Shanahan, but didn’t.
April 28, 2017 Update: Shananah’s response: “Probably.” [That’s the extent of Shanahan’s explanation. He provided no specific details as to how the cell temperature steadily rises while the input power steadily decreases over several days in this graph. Dr. Shanahan, if you want to reply further, please send your comments to the contact page here. I will publish them so long as your reply is specific and exclusive to this graph and your response reflects professional etiquette.]
Krivit does not answer Shanahan’s question … at all.
The input voltage shows a decreasing trend, not the power, that’s what the plot shows. And this is not “steadily.” (Nor is the temperature “steadily” increasing.) But, yes, we know that this is a decreased power input. Shanahan simply pointed to his paper. Does it propose mechanisms? Well, “CCS” is Shanahan’s code word for an effective shift in cell calibration caused by unexpected recombination or a shift in where recombination occurs. Some such shift, as an example, could indeed cause an effect as shown. As well, shifts in loading could create such effects. How large is the effect?
At 4.9 V and 400 mA, the input power is about 1.96 W. The claimed XP is 115 mW by the end of day 6, or about 5.9% of input power. In an SRI series, this would be considered barely reportable. However, FP calorimetry was reputed to be quite precise, on the level of 0.1 mW.
Why is the voltage going down? With constant current, the cell resistance is going down, so the power supply lowers the voltage to keep current constant. Here is my stab at it:
Water is being split into deuterium and oxygen. That’s endothermic. Then the deuterium is absorbed by the cathode. That is exothermic initially, but moves toward endothermic as loading reaches the values necessary for the FP Heat Effect. Fleischmann-Pons calculations include these issues (or they would not be accurate; these are open cells, not cells with a recombiner where the potential energy created when deuterium and oxygen are dissociated. If there is an unexpected shift in this chemistry, the XP values would be incorrect. Ideally, the gases are measured, and loading is monitored. It’s complex. This is not a job for Steve Knee-Jerk.
And it’s not a job for me, either, unless I’m prepared to put a lot of time into it. I would much prefer to see a careful discussion here, with THH and, I’d hope, Shanahan, and others, as well; here, I’d organize this so that useful content is created. He is totally free and invited to comment here. THH has author privileges and I’d give them to Kirk as well, in appreciation for his years of service as the Necessary Skeptic.
Going back to the original post. LENR advocates would I think agree that they get relatively little scientific critiques from mainstream scientists, or indeed anyone who is technically competent and highly skeptical, so interested in finding holes in arguments.
All this is symptomatic that this is debate, not scientific investigation, where “sides” are arrayed against each other, rehashing old issues, with issues never being fully resolved, with true consensus being elusive. To me, the big disappointment was the 2004 U.S. DoE review. It was superficial and hasty, like much with LENR. The review made claims pretending to be reports that were not supported by the review paper evidence (that were actually contradictory to it). The review process obviously did not include serious, interactive analysis of data, where errors would be corrected, instead they were allowed to stand.
The review did agree that further research was warranted, and half the panel considered that the anomalous heat was real, i.e., at least there is an anomaly — or collection of them — to investigate. If the DoE had actually been paying serious attention, they would have established a LENR desk. For their part, the review paper authors made no specific request. So they got no specific result. Funny how that works.
They need that. So I find no excuse for the process Kirk notes in the first posts here. Marwan et al may believe they have settled Kirk’s points. More likely (and my judgement reading the source material) they have partially addressed them.
… and possibly in a somewhat misleading way. However, the context is important. Kirk had been criticising LENR research strongly, on the internet, since the 1990s. I attempted to search for his posts on vortex-l, but that list is archived in zipfiles that Google does not search. Practically useless, typical Beatty.
Kirk’s points were answered again and again. To his mind, those answers were inadequate. I met Kirk on Wikipedia in 2009, when I first started investigating cold fusion. I saw him as the last standing major critic. I attempted to support examination of his ideas. I found him hostile and combative. I also attempted to present his ideas on Wikiversity. He cooperated with none of it.
If there are errors on Wikiversity, anyone could correct them.
The way to elucidate this is for them to defend their work against critiques of their defence – not to ignore the critiques of the defence and answer only the original points. Kirk similarly of course, but in this case I have noticed this phenomena less, he picks up on nearly all of the points made by Marwan et al.
His Letter to JEM was the last stand of published LENR critique. He has complained that JEM would not publish his final reply. This would be an editorial decision, not that of the scientists who replied to him, called the “Marwan” critique. Marwan and Krivit were the original authors, and Krivit dropped out, claiming editorial misbehavior. Vintage Krivit.
The Letter contained gross errors, so bad that the respondents did not even address them (and apparently did not understand them), and it was on a crucial point, Shanahan claiming to have analyzed data in a chart published by Storms, finding low correlation between heat and helium, when the chart actually shows quite the opposite. Shanahan had misunderstood the chart, which showed the scatter in heat/helium results, so the x-axis was heat and the y-axis was helium/heat. As the operating hypothesis is that there is an experimental ratio between heat and helium, that this may be a constant except for experimental error, what is actually shown is that as heat increases, the ratio settles, as would be expected from the lessening effect of fixed experimental errors. If the experimental data were perfect, there would be no correlation between heat and helium/heat. It took a long time before Shanahan admitted he had erred. His first response when I pointed it out to him was on the lines of “You will do anything to cling to your beliefs.” Pot, meet kettle.
That is water under the bridge.
From such a to and fro one can obtained a balanced view of the likely validity of each point. Normally both sides end up agreeing, or at least agreeing that areas of disagreement require further work. Typically what happens here is that points made are valid for a specific set of circumstances, and elucidating whether than covers the matters of interest takes time and effort.
The issue here is not primarily about who is right in this exchange. It is about how you convince independent observers that you are right.
Anyone with that goal has left science and is dwelling in politics and attachments. The assumption THH is operating on is adversarial, not collaborative. It’s also personal. Convince others “that you are right.”
I prefer to set up process that will facilitate finding consensus, which may include creating new experimental results to clarify issues. There is a place in this for review and discussion of what has already been done, and I hope that this can take place here, but Wikiversity could also be appropriate.
See Cold fusion
Many interested in cold fusion complain about Wikipedia suppression, but few, hardly any, would participate on Wikiversity, I found, which has standards much more like those of academia, it is not an “encyclopedia,” but more like an eclectic combination of university library, seminars, and studies, including student work.
In theory, then, Wikipedia would link to Wikiversity for “further study.” That would be standard, but was always suppressed by the dominant faction on Wikipedia. It is one of the actions of that faction that would not have been supported by the full Wikipedia community, but they got away with it because of lack of attention and clear stand, lack of unity and collaboration among supporters of cold fusion, or such collaboration expressed not in accordance with Wikipedia policies. Basically, the faction banned the editors with the editorial skills needed (such as myself and pcarbonn). They were about personal winning, and not actually aligned with Wikipedia policy.
In any case, I have uploaded the documents here:
On LENR Forum, Jed Rothwell wrote:
@AN: You just forget, that all useful reactors were built by IH…
Rossi claimed that he built some. He claimed they worked. I.H. tested the ones he made and the ones they made. None of them worked. But, anyway, if Rossi has one that works, he can have it tested independently. If it works, I.H. will pay up. Or, if they don’t pay up, he can easily win the lawsuit by citing the independent replication. Either way it is in his interests to have the claim confirmed independently.
As is common, Wyttenbach “reminds” us of useless and possibly misleading information. I have myself stated that IH made the reactors used at Doral, but I do not recall where that information came from, it may simply be something based on RossiSays that got picked up and treated as true. There were large reactor assemblies that might be “Big Frankies” that were transported from Italy to North Carolina. Perhaps someone will point to, like, actual evidence?
However, what Jed wrote simply is not so. Evidence of independent testing, if it existed, would still be irrelevant to Rossi’s basic $89 million claim against IH. That is based on nonpayment claimed to be a breach of contract, and to that claim requires that the contract require the payment, whereas there is ample evidence that the opportunity for a GPT was missed, through deliberate refusal to approve of the Second Amendment, on the part of Ampenergo (as well as other problems). That some Rossi device, somewhere else, “worked,” perhaps, even, a truly reliable test, simply doesn’t trigger that payment unless the Agreement conditions were met, and they clearly were not.
What is being confused here is an IH statement of intention to pay if Rossi satisfies them — voluntarily –, with an idea that they must pay.
In the counterclaim, which is distinct and different, whether or not Rossi devices work could be relevant, and evidence of independent testing could be introduced, in defense of Rossi. The original Rossi claim, though, is dead in the water — and, my opinion, very likely to be thoroughly burnt toast shortly, the evidence and facts sufficient to dismiss it being clear, and not at all vague or requiring jury assessment.
What remains and what may possibly require jury review are the counterclaims, against Rossi, and including the claims against Johnson, Bass, and Fabiani. Maybe. I have not completed my review of the MSJs.
However, it does appear that some Rossi claims, signed under penalty of perjury, have been egregiously false; so a risk for him has arisen of criminal prosecution. The “Johnson Matthey” issue is the clearest. He led IH to believe that JM was the real customer behind JMC/JMP, there can be no reasonable doubt of this from Rossi’s emails, plus, of course, there is the testimony of Darden and Vaughn, plus the emails of Johnson and Bass, and then he set up conditions to discourage IH from checking through direct communication with JM. All this makes no sense unless Rossi originally brought up JM — and wanted IH to continue their (mis)understanding.
Meanwhile, Annesser and Chaiken apparently left PBY&A and have set up their own firm, Annesser and Chaiken, PLLC. The email address provided is on a new domain, registered April 17, 2017. It’s parked at godaddy. Annesser and Chaiken are no longer listed on the PBY&A professionals page, as they were on the latest Internet Archive page showing them.
I had noticed an oddity: in the Discover hearing April 20, there was an appearance by Robert Bernstein, who is shown as a Silver Law Group attorney, and who is not listed as counsel for Rossi. Ruth Silver, the principal at SLG, has withdrawn from the case, so what was Bernstein doing there? I suspected Annesser needed some help, asked Bernstein to appear, but without Bernstein making a formal appearance in the case, as counsel for a party, (which I haven’t seen), I’m not at all sure about how that works. (Annesser is still listed as part of the SLG team. But his Linked-in profile shows this association as having ended in 2016. — and it still shows him at PBY&A. The SLG web site is obsolete.)
Actually, I just looked at Bernstein’s Linked-in page. He has been quicker to update. He is now listing himself as an associate attorney with Annesser and Chaiken PLLC. That is why he appeared at that hearing (which was after ACLaw was created as an email domain.)
So Rossi’s lawsuit has taken half the attorneys away from Silver Law Group (the least experienced ones, to be sure). Aw, Ruth, if you read this, to steal a phrase from Lenny Bruce, you betta off.
Some more comments on LF discussion:
IH Fanboy (with his misleading and perhaps trolling username) repeats himself, over and over, on certain points. Generally, he does not actually cite evidence, but sometimes we can recognize the source. It’s typically misleading.
Assuming this fascinating business comes to trial, I do hope that counsel for IH ensure that the idea that Rossi could could at any time have openly demonstrated a working eCat . . .
I’m going to break the rest of the IHFB comment into numbered sections.
[1] He did.
Not. NA means a an independently verifiable test, not merely some “demonstration” with Rossi in full control. Planet Rossi generally justifies Rossi secrecy based on his need to protect his IP from being stolen, but it is quite possible to do a black box test. It does require certain additional precautions, that’s all. (Such as running for substantially longer to rule out energy storage.)
[2.] Not only that, IH (i.e., specifically Dameron) built reactors themselves.
They did. They claim that they didn’t “work.” This must be understood, see below.
[3.] Darden (yes, the VC guy) apparently fueled them himself.
He did, and that makes complete sense.
[4.] They produced COPs upwards of 9.
Here IHFB simply assumes that Darden et al are lying. He has lost track of something — or willfully ignores it. Reactors do not “produce” COPs. COP is the result of a measurement analysis, and sane measurement includes the use of controls, etc. It is quite easy to calculate COPs that are wildly off, if measurements or analyses of them are in error. IH did “reproduce” Rossi claims, but then identified artifact; that is far more convincing as a negative replication than merely obtaining different results. It appears that when they used Rossi measurement protocols, they also got these elevated COPs.
Or Darden et al are lying, under oath. There isn’t much more room for middle ground here.
[5.] Dameron was still running them as late as January 2016 in the same building where Murray was just getting set up with his modified version of the reactor.
This is irrelevant. It is not clear what IHFB’s point is. I would expect IH to continue to test well beyond the ordinary “give-up” point. The essential point for IH is that what Rossi taught them to do doesn’t work. Whether the set of reactors under test in Doral “worked” or not is actually irrelevant to the suit: Rossi did not successfully transfer working IP with commercial value. Perhaps he waved his magic wand in Doral, applied liberal amounts of Rossi Grease. It doesn’t matter. The set-up to consider that a “GPT” was radically defective, on many grounds.
[6.] That is, until IH boxed everything up and closed shop, according to Murray, in response to the filing of the lawsuit.
Did Murray say “in response to the filing …”? This probably is based on something from the Murray deposition. You can find it on this page, which lists all deposition exhibits. As it happens, we have the entire deposition. It is 423 pages. Which one?
What appears to me is that IH finally gave up spending more money trying to validate the Rossi IP.
However, what did Murray actually say? Starting on deposition p. 102, he is talking about the Dameron tests (apparently IH wanted some independent testing internally, which makes sense.)
20· · · · A.· · Yeah, I remember he had a thermal imager, and
21· ·he kind of described it to us a little bit.· I recall
22· ·asking him to set up a test plan and test procedure and,
23· ·so we could document what was going on, and that just
24· ·fell by the wayside.
25· · · · Q.· · Did you set up a test plan and test procedure
·1· ·for your test?
·2· · · · A.· · Yes, we did.
·3· · · · Q.· · Do you know if that was produced in
·4· ·discovery?
·5· · · · A.· · I’m pretty sure it was.· We took the entire
·6· ·body of all the data and shared it.· So I would imagine
·7· ·it’s somewhere in there, test plans and test procedures.
·8· · · · Q.· · Okay.· And where is the device that you
·9· ·tested now, if you know?
10· · · · A.· · I can’t say today, but I know before we
11· ·closed up shop we took everything related to the
12· ·litigation under the direction of Jones Day and we put
13· ·it all together, and we boxed it up and we put it into
14· ·the locked facility in the back of the building.· So I’m
15· ·sure it’s all in there.
This does not state that the “closing up shop” was “in response to the lawsuit.” Rather, they simply are not like Rossi, who destroyed possible evidence (much more relevant to the lawsuit than what IH was doing privately). They followed legal advice, and it is unlikely that Rossi spoliated the evidence upon legal advice. If so, there might be an attorney in very hot water.
IHFB makes many claims without evidence, and is unreliable.
@THH. What was the claimed input power in Lugano? A figure of 800Watts comes to mind, but that’s from memory. I can get a better insulated (and smaller) reactor to 1500C on 160W. So I would thin that 800W (if I am correct) would not need to be any kind of fiddled input measurement.
Smith is being lazy (and my memory was a power increase from 800 early on to 900 W later). It’s easy to look at the Lugano report. Claimed input power was around 810 W., then increased to 904 – 923 W. Claimed temperature from their defective camera analysis was about 1260 C at the lower power input to 1410 C at the higher power input.
Smith is likely correct in that input power measurement error is unlikely in the Lugano test. COP estimated was 3.13 – 3.74, which appears well within range of the blatant calorimetry error.
It’s been claimed that using a thermal camera for calorimetry was wildly inappropriate. I’ll disagree (as did Jed Rothwell). The problem was that they misused the camera, and botched the analysis, compounded by a failure to calibrate under operating conditions (i.e., using a dummy cell at full input power). It appears that one of the shouting matches with Rossi occurred when IH pointed out to Rossi that the cell he was measuring high COP with was a dummy cell. No fuel. Oops! At that point, I suspect, Rossi concluded they were snakes. Only a snake would steal the fuel!
(I have read this dummy cell story but have not confirmed it. Perhaps someone will point to a source. We really do have a mountain of evidence, see this page where I have collected it. I have started to prepare a timeline. If anyone wants to help, please contact me!)
And then there was this from IHFB:
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Rossi can do anything he likes with the IP, so long as he doesn’t SELL items made using it in the territories already ceded to IH.
While I agree with you on this point, IH is (humorously) claiming otherwise in the suit. They think their territorial license somehow blocks Rossi globally.
Well, what Nigel wrote is substantially true, but not completely true. He cannot do “anything he likes.” In offering licenses, in other territories, IH has, from the Agreement, a right of first refusal. Hydrofusion and certain other pre-existing licensees are explicitly exempted from this.
As usual, IHFB is making things up when describing what IH “thinks.” He should get his mind-reading crystal ball fixed. They do not think what he wrote; but, hey, if they do, perhaps IHFB could quote the source, or at least give us calibration data on that crystal ball.
The bottom line here is that, no matter what IH “thinks,” Rossi could have continued to market his invention, IH could not stop that, except by matching any new offers, and could not stop him from agreeing with Hydrofusion, for one, and providing them IP, if they are still willing to talk to him.
This gift just keeps on giving. When we argue with b-s’ers, if we are not careful, we can get b-s all over us. Sigmoidal, normally quite cogent, wrote this:
IH Fanboy wrote:
Yes, I think the APCO inspired unable-to-substantiate-all-without-success is BS. And I think Darden and Vaughn did their best to stick to that story line in their depositions. Dewey suggested awhile back that he suspected Rossi’s team is gearing up to impeach witnesses. And it probably has something to do with deposition testimony compared to disclosed test report data.
The connection between “unable to substantiate” and APCO is a Planet Rossi trope based on the fact that an APCO consultant (later in business for himself, and who also visited the Doral Plant — or tried to, he may have been rejected, the Rossi email mentioning him and the list of visitors from IH imply that he was not allowed to visit, which would have been the first known clear violation of the Term Sheet) was on cc from the March 2016 announcement, which proves almost nothing. Darden and Vaughn would not care much about publicity, certainly not enough to perjure themselves. Darden and Vaughn are personally at very low risk here, the Rossi attempt to pierce the corporate veil is doomed, it is clearly contrary to law and precedent. However, Sigmoidal replied:
Well, not suprisingly I think your thinking is absurd, as I have implied over and over again.
But even with the extremely remotely possibilty that you are not simply seriously deceiving yourself and Rossi actually has something, there is nothing stopping him from demonstrating his high COP system, right now, this instant.
Well, if he has a high-reliability Quark-X system, nothing would actually be stopping him — other than, perhaps, his health. As to an E-Cat system, it is not at all clear that he has any devices ready to test.
This would have the effect of demolishing IH, winning the court case, awarding him over a quarter of a billion (with a ‘b’) dollars, completely destroying Darden’s reputation, opening up vast amounts of VC capital in Europe and other regions not covered by the license, result in fabulously increased quality of life for all, be the greatest discovery since fire (and that is no exaggeration), result in a virtual lock for the Nobel Prize Rossi so covets, and more.
No, it would not have that effect. First of all, the primary case is about $89 million. The “triple damages” thing is entirely separate, and a demonstration of a real device would have no effect on it, this is about a claim that Darden and Vaughn never intended to pay, and deceived Rossi about Cherokee, etc., all of which is terminally weak, with no substantial evidence having appeared other than Rossi hysteria.
Rossi already ran “demonstrations.” But let’s assume that Sigmoidal actually means rigorous independent testing by reliable experts.
“Greatest discovery since fire” is an exaggeration. Rossi did not discover LENR, nor did he discover NiH. He may have discovered a particular engineering approach, if he hasn’t been entirely a con …. but that latter possibility is looking very, very likely at this point.
No, he would not get the Nobel Prize. There is no Nobel for inventions.
However, Rossi has moved on to even better inventions. The mind boggles trying to imagine how awesome that will be!
Yes, Sigmoidal is being sarcastic, but is feeding certain tropes in doing so. Sarcasm in posts like this doesn’t come across cleanly.
But if there were any doubt, we know that a dummy reactor was measuring high COP.
Yep, according to Darden’s story, he must have known as early as January of 2014 that it was all a big scam, because a dummy reactor gave the same COP as the other reactors.
This is based on a deposition, and testimony in a deposition, unless controverted, is legally “fact.” However, what IHFB says here is a conclusion from Darden’s testimony, not the testimony. This confusion between fact and conclusions is common for IHFB — and others as well. What that testimony indicates is the possibility or probability of error in measuring COP, which has already been widely suspected. This does not prove it was “all a big scam,” though it certainly raises questions of major error.
The problem is that we have these little things called facts.
IHFB should have his mouth washed out with soap for presenting implications and imaginations as “fact.”
Such as, Darden then proceeded to secure tens of millions of outside investment over the course of the next year and a half,
If Darden had done that and then threw the money at Rossi, it would have been a major problem. Rather, Darden et al continued to investigate, and the major funding raised was used for other projects, not Rossi. IHFB has pointed again and again to the quick reaction of Woodford to the draft IH press release in March, 2016 as if it proved that Woodford was really investing in Rossi and had been deceived. It doesn’t show that at all. There was a hope, obviously, that Rossi technology would pan out and the various failures would have been fixed.
and also required everyone to leave the lab in Dec/January 2016 so that he could carefully and secretively load the scam fuel into Murray’s modified reactor. Wouldn’t want the secrets of the scam fuel to get out.
IHFB is implying that this is inconsistent, but, in fact, it is fully consistent with what we know. That fuel mixture is not “scam fuel,” it would be what Rossi disclosed in 2013, and the failed test (control showing the same apparent heat as the experimental device) does not prove “scam.” It could just as easily show that Rossi had decided to torpedo the IH effort, perhaps feeling that he had not been paid or promised enough. IH simply continued with their plan (to “crush the tests”), and the fuel details divulged by Rossi (real or scam) were kept as a closely-guarded secret. IHFB is sarcastically implying that the appearance of contradiction (in his mind) proves that Darden was lying. This is how IHFB thinks, apparently. It’s not uncommon on Planet Rossi.
Rossi’s reported reaction to that no-fuel finding demonstrates that he is definitely not a scientist. A scientist would be very interested, not angry. However, if that was a no-fuel test without telling Rossi, it would have been (1) brilliant, and (2) very likely to set him off. Rossi clearly cannot stand independent testing, and a test that might show him up, proof that they are snakes.
IHFB went on and on with preposterous claims, as the LF thread on Rossi v. Darden wanders far from the nominal topic with the full collaboration of at least one LF moderator, now over 7000 posts.
Unluckily the burden of proof is on the IH side. They signed a foolish contract…
No, in the U.S. court system the burden of proof is on Rossi. The defendant is assumed innocent. You have to show strong evidence that the test worked, I.H. knows it, and it tried to cheat Rossi. I.H. cannot be found guilty if they have a legitimate difference of opinion regarding the test results.
Jed is confusing civil with criminal liability. “Guilt” is not an issue in civil cases. A clue is that mens rea (guilty intention) is not required to find civil fraud. The basic Rossi case was a claim of breach of contract, so for a court to find liability under the contract, the elements would have to be shown. The test “working” was not actually part of the contract, this was first noticed by Planet Rossi, which thought that the case was ironclad.
Basically, test results were up to the “ERV.” That is how it was written, Wyttenback is correct about that. However, there are some problems for the Rossi claim. First of all, the Agreement was not followed in setting up the faux GPT. To allow a postponed GPT, the Second Amendment was attempted, but that failed because of Ampenergo refusal to sign, a fact that Rossi left out of his complaint. IH only claimed, in their MTD, a technical failure, missing signatures (and then the “6 cylinder unit” issue, which simply shows that the Second Amendment, never having been completely executed, was ignored (until it came time for Rossi to make his $89 million claim). Easily, IH and Rossi could have made a side-agreement, but Rossi did not attempt that, apparently. Instead, he set up a faux customer to encourage IH to give him possession of the reactors, and arranged for Penon to measure heat — all of this without mentioning “GPT.” Far from getting the signatures of “all parties” to the start of a GPT, as the Second Amendment required, had it been valid.
If Rossi and IH had clearly agreed on Doral as a GPT, and Penon as the ERV for it, Rossi’s case would have been far stronger. Yes, IH could possibly defend on various bases, and a claim of fraud would be one of these. But the initial presumption would be as the Agreement had it: the ERV report was binding. I think IH felt safe with that because the originally contemplated GPT would have been in their facility where they could observe it very closely.
There is no presumption as Jed describes in civil cases. Rather, the judge or a jury is looking for equity, and a jury decision must be unanimous — in Federal Court — and there is no presumption at law as to which party is right. A requirement for absolute proof (“beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal cases) could be quite unfair. The standard is merely the preponderance of the evidence, for the trier of fact (i.e., the judge or the jury in a jury trial).
(That is why O.J. Simpson could be found “not guilty” in a criminal trial for murder, but responsible for damages in a civil case.)
By the way, can you point out to me where Penon’s deposition was under oath? I have “lost” that. I would think that it is in there but not finding it.
The attestation of the notary.
By the way, there is a list of all deposition exhibits, with a Table of Contents at the top, so that any deposition can be quickly found, and I’m going over it to list what pages are included in each copy. I may then create composites with all the pages we have.
Peter Gluck dutifully reports all swamp gas from Andrea Rossi’s blog, JONP. So I saw this there, first. There are so many posts like this that I can’t and won’t keep up.
Napoleon
April 22, 2017 at 7:13 AM
Dear Dr Andrea Rossi:
The puppets of the so called “ventriloquist of Raleigh” are saying that IH received the 50 millions from Woodford because they had in portfolio many intellectual properties, not only yours. But I discovered that this is false! Reading the documents published by the Court, I saw that Woodford invested 50 millions in IH on February 2015 and at that time IH had only your IP in the portfolio! To make more clear the fraud of IH toward you, is the fact that Tom Darden made visits with only your IP in IH’s portfolio with senior officers of Woodford in your plant, to convince them to pay him the 50 millions and enjoyed the reference of the engineer of JM (Jim Bass) in the same day, during the visit of the same senior officers of Woodford in your plant of Doral.
Isn’t this true?
Cheers
A friend of yours of the silent majority that sustains your work and is disgusted from the dishonesty of the ventriloquist.
A “ventriloquist” is a performer who makes a puppet or other object appear to speak by suppressing the normal mouth and facial movements that allow us to identify the speaker. On this internet, this is someone who creates and writes through “sock puppets,” after the real sock puppets used by some ventriloquists. Continue reading “The ventriloquist of Miami”
Sometimes I have seen claims on lenr-forum.com that the public can obtain transcripts of court hearings by paying for them. I may have said this myself, here, because the filings imply this. However, during the 90 day period before hearing transcripts are published to PACER, it appears that only parties and attorneys may obtain transcripts, they are limited:
During the 90-day period (which may be extended by the court), access to the transcript in CM/ECF is restricted to court staff, public terminal users, attorneys of record or parties who have purchased the transcript from the court reporter/transcriber, and other persons as directed by the court (e.g., appellate attorneys). Also, during this time, parties may redact personal identifiers. After the 90-day period has ended, the filed transcript will be available for inspection and copying in the clerk’s office and for download from the court’s CM/ECF system through the judiciary’s PACER system.
Just as any member of the public may attend the actual hearings, any member of the public may use the “public terminal” in the court to read the transcript.
There are two obvious concerns. First of all, a hearing transcript may reveal personal information, that could be redacted. This is covered by Privacy Policy for Electronic Case Files. The court will not publish the files, other than on the public terminal — which does not allow printing, but, ah, google glass? — ; however, the concerns are to have been addressed within 31 days of the filing of the transcript. Even short of that, it is unclear that publication by an attorney (i.e., providing the transcript to media), if any private data has been redacted, would be a violation. American Bar has a discussion.
The personal identifiers to be redacted are Social Security numbers, names of minor children, financial account numbers, dates of birth, and, in criminal cases, home addresses2.
This brings up the other concern, an attempt to influence the case by “extrajudicial” comment.
Several topics presumed prejudicial to proceedings relate specifically to criminal proceedings. This reflects the comment’s recognition that certain types of proceedings, notably civil matters triable to a jury, criminal matters, and matters that could result in incarceration, are particularly likely to be prejudiced by extrajudicial statements. See Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct R. 3.6 cmt. [6]. These concerns further explain the additional limits on extrajudicial comments (discussed below) that Model Rule 3.8(f) imposes on prosecutors.
Statements Presumed Not Likely to Create Material Prejudice
While the comment sets forth a list of topics presumed to create prejudice, Model Rule 3.6(b) itself provides a “safe harbor” of statements that a lawyer can publish with considerably less concern about whether a pending adjudication may be substantially prejudiced. According to Model Rule 3.6(b), and the majority of comparable state rules, there are seven categories of information that presumably may be disclosed publicly:
the claim, offense, or defense involved and, except when prohibited by law, the identity of the persons involved;
information contained in a public record;
that an investigation of a matter is in progress;
the scheduling or result of any step in litigation;
a request for assistance in obtaining evidence and information necessary thereto;
a warning of danger concerning the behavior of a person involved, when there is reason to believe that there exists the likelihood of substantial harm to an individual or to the public interest; and
in a criminal case, in addition to subparagraphs (1) through (6): (i) the identity, residence, occupation, and family status of the accused;
(ii) if the accused has not been apprehended, information necessary to aid in apprehension of that person;
(iii) the fact, time, and place of arrest; and
(iv) the identity of investigating and arresting officers or agencies and the length of the investigation.
This list is not intended to be an exhaustive list of topics on which extrajudicial statements are permitted. Rather, Model Rule 3.6(b) is intended only to provide lawyers with a list of categories they can discuss publicly with little fear of violating the rules of professional conduct. See Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct R. 3.6 cmt. [4]. For an interesting case discussing application of the safe harbor where a lawyer effectively paraphrases statements in the public record, see PCG Trading, LLC v. Seyfarth Shaw, LLP, 460 Mass. 265, 951 N.E.2d 315 (Mass. 2011).
Is the transcript “information contained in a public record”? Any member of the public may access the transcript. The intention is to avoid revelation of private information, on the one hand, and to avoid prejudice, but this is being balanced with the right of the public to know, and of media to report on the proceedings. Media could send a reporter to the hearing, who could take notes (even verbatim notes if the reporter has that skill, i.e., the skills possessed by an old-fashioned court reporter or stenographer). See Media rules and also General Order 58.
A related concern is that transcripts may contain information that could not be presented to a jury as evidence. However, if it is public record, too bad. A party may request the court to redact anything prejudicial, it is not routine.
So to the present practical reality. It has been claimed that IH is attempting to dominate discussion of the case, while there is no evidence for that.
The argument is that IH would want to appear to the public as the “savior” of LENR. However, sending stooges to the blogs is a very poor way to do that; they could simply issue press releases with facts that are already public record. If they were interested in astroturfing — the definition of which does not resemble anything operative in Rossi v. Darden — there are other actions they could take. How about sending gobs of money to, say, LENRIA or Infusion Institute Inc.? Hint! So far, not a penny to III from IH or anyone reasonably accusable of being an IH stooge. As far as I know, no supporter of III has received any benefit other than information from IH or IH employees or contractors.
I’ll be setting up crowdfunding, though, and there would be no way to prevent such contributions, but … I would certainly disclose any attempt to prejudice my reporting.
(Setting up organizations that pretend to be grass-roots movements but that are actually under the influence and control of the master organization, for the purpose of influencing legislation, through letter-writing campaigns, was “astroturfing,” and that still goes on, but has nothing to do with LENR or Rossi v. Darden. Example, APCO apparently advised the tobacco industry, their clients, to set up such organizations, to pretend that there was a mass movement to protect the rights of smokers — to kill themselves with cigarettes without being informed about the involved science. There are anti-AGW organizations now that are reasonably considered astroturfing, but not all anti-AGW comment is from such, and, in the end, it shouldn’t matter if legislators keep their eye on the ball. On the other hand, if the legislator is corrupt, influenced by campaign donations, always a worry, and lazy, i.e., doesn’t verify the alleged public stand but uses it as an excuse, astroturfing could work.)
Any party could reveal transcripts extrajudicially, bearing in mind the limitations and rules, but, to my knowledge, no party has done so. Publishing excerpts from hearings, as evidence for motions, has been routinely done when relevant. That is not “extrajudicial.” If I were in Florida, I could go to the public terminal and take notes, it appears that this does not violate the rules.
I find it all quite odd, because notes can be inaccurate and biased, and as a non-party and non-attorney, I could not be readily sanctioned for publishing my notes. What would make much more sense would be an accelerated schedule for the public availability of transcripts. There seems to be no stated justification for that requiring 90 days.
Suppose the public sees that some party is being unfairly treated in court. The public could intervene by donating to a defense fund, for example. However, if the transcripts that might show this are not available until, say, after the trial, not to mention all the pretrial maneuvering, the right of the public, the very purpose of requiring public access, is frustrated and only useful for possible appellate review, which can be too late for some important issues.
As part of searching for sources for information on this issue, I found no example of sanctions for public review not showing some egregious violation. The case cited above, PCG Trading, LLC v. Seyfarth Shaw, LLP , involved a denial of an appearance pro hoc vice based on an alleged comment in a law review article. In the end, this denial was rejected by the appeals court, because it fell within the “safe harbor,” in the judgment of that court. Remarkable case: there what stands out is an attorney (Seyfarth Shaw) with an undisclosed conflict of interest who screwed his client over by filing a motion to dismiss a case against the other client. That motion was then used as evidence to allow a filing against his continued client.
I did find a remarkable case where an attorney was sanctioned for uncivil behavior. That was extreme behavior compared to anything I’ve seen in this case, though I’ve seen what could be called uncollegial behavior, aggressive toward opposing attorneys, accusing them of misconduct, and the ruling on that case distinguishes between aggressive promotion of a client’s interests and incivility. What I find especially remarkable in this case was that the respondent blamed others for his own out-of-control behavior. They made him do it, by being such assholes. (including all the other involved attorneys and any judge that ruled against his arguments.) I kid you not. Who could blame him for shouting, in the presence of such extreme provocation? Remarkably, a referee determined a 90 day suspension. It appears that the attorney contested it instead of entering a consent order. The court upped it to two years, more than the Bar Association had requested (one year), required that respondent appear in court for a public reprimand, set up an 18-month probation on the end of the suspension, and recommended (perhaps required) counselling. And this was two strikes, three and additional sanctions would be applied. Disbarment. I hope that the fellow took this seriously. What I know about making mistakes like his is that if one declares and stands for responsibility, it can all go away, eventually. He’d become a more effective attorney. His attempts to blame others were the giveaway that this was not some accident. This also is not just about behavior in Court, this applies to life as a whole.
I also found reference to a case regarding how an attorney is to act if the attorney discovers perjury on the part of the client. It was an extreme case.
Rends, of the LENR Forum staff cabal, has amazing news for us:
Rends wrote:
I want to add some facts concerning the questions if IH is somehow related to Cherokeefund or not, which is denied by Darden et.al.
There is no “question” about the connection of IH and Cherokee, and this was known even before Rossi v. Darden was filed, naming Cherokee as a defendant, based on a claim that Darden and Vaughn had misled Rossi, claiming that he was really dealing with Cherokee and that Industrial Heat was just a front or the like.
IH and Cherokee have not denied the “connection,” as Rends claims with no evidence, but only the claim of Cherokee ownership of and responsibility for Industrial Heat. So what happened? Continue reading “Rendsing a dead horse”
Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there.
On LENR Forum, Argon wrote:
There is not much new facts anymore to dig from court documents. Re-circling around pipe diameter (it was first claimed to be 5″ , remember), pressure and window frame paints and reflections, marks on the floor etc. is waste of time at this point. There is no clear evidence did Rossis container produce extra heat or not no matter how much we dig photo details and stains on floor.
Argon has noticed that much. But what it seems he is doing is looking for “new facts,” as if most everything is already known. Distinguishing between fact and fantasy can be … difficult. Most of us walk around in illusion and fantasy, starting with our sensory experience, which is heavily filtered and processed so that we don’t notice the artifacts, such as entoptic phenomena. We have Motions for Summary Judgment pending. These will depend on fact, not fantasy and speculative judgment. And my guess is that Argon does not discriminate, and confuses the two, routinely. It would not be surprising. In many ways, that is how most of us live, until we die and the illusions fall apart. Maybe. “Nice place to visit.”
In any case, thanks to Argon for the work involved in putting together a series of Planet Rossi tropes.
What instead has been shown plain clear in documents is that:
-Ross become suspicious on IH:s agenda, and is now proven, for a good reason.
No surprise, Planet Rossi thinks like Rossi. This is well-known in sophisticated circles: treat people with suspicion, they will come to merit the suspicion. Argon is, here, asserting “proof” for a claim of agenda. What stands as “proof” for Argon?
-IH was trying to rule LENR markets by trying to capture all relevant LENR IPR. IH business plan is so revealing and clear on this.
Argon doesn’t cite the sources. I’ve been going over and over those sources. I don’t see what he sees, what he thinks is “so revealing and clear.” IH clearly wants to be a major player with LENR. They are not, however, attempting to control the entire field, but rather to cooperate and collaborate with very much of it. They do not see LENR as a zero-sum game, unlike, say, Andrea Rossi, who has been explicitly attempting to dominate the market, to own it, he’s been very open about it.
What IH obviously wants to do is to, first, stimulate LENR progress (including by funding basic research without commercial potential in itself), and, second, to be in a position to recognize and participate in genuine commercial opportunities, if those arise. Right now, I don’t know of any, but they might know more and it is their business to know more. If they operate with lies and deception, they could easily trash their relationship with the field.
-Funding rest of the researchers they tried to control how LENR comes to market – if ever. (any research community members want to speak up?)
Most CMNS researchers will not come close to fora like LENR-Forum. This is meaningless. “Coming to market” is way premature for the field. Rossi was the only game even asserted to be close. Brillouin Energy makes some claims, but if one reads them closely, they are not close. They are merely promising, if that. Nobody really understands how LENR works, it is, at this point, a lab curiosity, unreliable, difficult to control. There are some experimental approaches working on that, but the best work at this point is fundamental science, particularly confirming and measuring with increased precision the heat/helium correlation in palladium deuteride work. This has no commercial implications and is being funded, effectively, through charitable contribution and state matching funds. IH is, of course, quite aware of this. I was told first by someone from IH that the effort in this regard was well-funded, and only discovered the source of that funding later.
What I do know is that IH has good relations with most of the established researchers in the field, if not all, and there is no sign of discontent or opposition to IH there.
-It become as big surprise to IH that Mr Rossi choose rather to fall with IH in court than let them steal and control the LENR market. For example mr Weaver learnd about problems just late February just before IH published their press release. Until that he was going full ahead on expanding IH:s smelly reach.
This is incoherent. Rossi’s action filing the lawsuit has demolished his own fundraising possibilities. Weaver knew about issues with Rossi long before last February, but held his water.
-Hiring israeli partners to do the dirty work to invalidate test report by seemingly unethical means – no matter was court sealing the doc or not. The proof is there in black on white,
There is no evidence of “hired Israeli partners.” This was Levi’s fantasy. There is no “proof,” but not only is there no proof, there is no evidence other than Levi’s rant. There is no evidence that the private investigator was working for IH, and no evidence that the investigator attempted to “invalidate” the Lugano report. Essentially, it takes a paranoid mind to read the documents that way. Argon is claiming “proof” in “black and white,” but does not actually point to it. Game on, Argon. Put up or shut up.
In some of the court pleadings, attorneys claim proof, and point to documents as evidence, and those documents don’t support the claims, and sometimes even the opposite. In some circles, that would be called “lying.” Claims in pleadings, though, are not subject to perjury for false representations, though sometimes there can be sanctions.
– Mr Weaver sending very nasty mail to Swedish professors should be glowing warning sign for any current and future business partners to stay far away from any IH-initiatives. I’m very delighted to see that Swedish companies are much more far sighting.
I didn’t find that mail nasty at all, nor did the recipient claim it was nasty. It was Levi who reacted that way, hysterically, and then Rossi claimed that this was an attempt to damage his Nobel Prize prospects. Yeah, right.
-Not signing amendment paper is just lawyer juggling and spells out loud and clear real IH skin.
It is not just a lack of signature, and it was not IH who did not sign. It was Ampenergo, Rossi’s long-term supporters, and this was not some merely technical oversight, it was deliberate. The Second Amendment, that allowed the GPT to be postponed, was invalid, and Rossi knew it. IH then said that Rossi could still earn the money, if he fulfilled the underlying purposes of the Agreement. Rossi took this as allowing him to set up a fake GPT (creating resemblances) without ever obtaining the written agreement that the Second Amendment required, if it had been valid. Rossi, being paranoid, never understood that in business, one must actually satisfy customers and investors, not merely fulfill some technical requirement. When he refused to allow Murray to visit the Doral plant, that was a bridge too far, way too far. This violated not only the Term Sheet, but also the clear intentions of the Agreement that IH would have the ability to fully observe the required tests. Rossi did not have the right to choose who would represent them, they had that right. Rossi, in his answer, explained that he believed that Murray was a spy. Spy for whom?’
And why would there be Rossi secrets at Doral, other than the Plant operation itself, which Rossi had supposedly fully disclosed to IH already?
Well, he was doing his own research there. Doral, instead of being what he had represented, a chemical manufacturing company, was entirely Rossi created, designed, controlled, and paid for. He rented the warehouse and only subleased part of it to “JMP” and all this really existed only on paper and in his mind. And he lied about it again and again.
-Big resources of Planet IH here is repeatedly and consistently redirecting discussion to some irrelevant details every time some one tries to touch some relevant subject. That is so clear pattern that this thread is very fruitful source for lots of manipulation studies to come. (see what happens quickly after this posting)
There are no “big resources of Planet IH” on LENR Forum. The closest is Jed Rothwell, who was at one time listed as a possible advisor. Jed has claimed he has not received any payments from IH; and I know Jed, for a long time, as a source of funding and support for LENR. He is not in IH’s pocket, he doesn’t need IH, but Jed supports LENR and anyone who supports LENR is, as the science, would be likely to have some friendly connection with IH. He’s visited them in North Carolina, which is not far from where he lives.
Then there is Dewey Weaver, who is not positing on LF any more and who might not go back. IH doesn’t need LF, for anything. I can guarantee that IH is not supporting coverage of Rossi v. Darden, at least not so far! I think I’d know about it!
– Have you ever wondered that IH was not willing to arrange test customers.
Liar, liar, pants on fire! Okay, he probably believes this carp. IH had a customer ready and willing, and Rossi rejected it, and this is clear not only from IH testimony, but from the Rossi email proposing the move of the Plant to Florida. Basically, Argon has believed Rossi Says, but has not modified his impressions by studying the case documents. And if he does, he will likely be searching for proof of what he already believes. That is the major way that we fool ourselves.
-Have you ever wondered why IH is not willing to give back the license if they think that Rossis conainer is expensive water boiler with COP of 1.
Why should they “give back” what they paid for? We do not know that IH has refused to return the license, nor on what conditions. This is all Rossi Says. One of the possibilities here, it is explicitly suggested by IH as one of two major possibilities is that Rossi actually has a real technology but is creating a breakdown of the IH Agreement in order to get them to return the license — as he did with Hydro Fusion before.
(Annesser ridiculed the “two alternatives,” ofensively, in my mind, as logically inaccurate. I.e., of course there are more than two possibilities, but some of them will not be ones that would be asserted by IH, such as “IH is lying through their teeth.” Logical possibility, to be sure. Not a practical one.)
As long as there is even a small possibility, I would expect IH to hold on to the license. However, if there is some consideration for return, such as a refund of their investment, they might let it go. That investment at this point is north of $20 million, I expect. Would they take less? I don’t know.
All this would be considered in settlement negotiations, if there are any, or in a court decision, if it comes to that.
Argon is thinking in black and white terms. I.e. if the technology is worthless, which he probably believes IH is claiming — I haven’t noticed that — then the license is worthless, but the value of a license like this, to a venture capitalist — and that is IH — is the probability of value in the future times the benefit if that value matures. In this case, the benefit could be a trillion dollars. What has been shown (from the IH point of view) is that Rossi did not transfer the technology to them, if it is real. So what is the probability that it is real? In this scenario, Rossi is withholding the secret, and he has done the like of this before. Rossi seems to understand that, with the License Agreement, he was not only selling the “E-cat,” but all related future development, such as Quark-X. And easily he might believe he sold it too cheaply.
But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. If there is enough cash on the barrel, IH might decide it would be better to invest that elsewhere. These are complex decisions, not the mindless “real or not” calculations of Argon. I know a lot, and I still don’t know which I would choose. To pay IH what it would take, though, would probably be more than Rossi has, so he’d need to find a new investor, if there are any left on Planet Earth who would trust him. Mostly Planet Rossi is a collection of losers, with big mouths and small pocketbooks. Still, you never can tell. How about Magnus and Hydro Fusion? Have they forgiven Rossi for what he did to them — by his account — in 2012? Hope springs eternal.
Disclaimer: No I don’t believe Rossi had anything produced in ‘customer’ container nor that ERV would be reliable, but I’m thankful for him to reveal true colors of IH:s LENR job. Someone will it as viable technology and LENR now escapes from IH:s hands – for the better of us all.
What I’ve seen of IH operations, in the court documents, actually gives me high faith in them as angel investors. I know some researchers that they have supported. Nobody is complaining, but Rossi, the one who received the most support, and IH did not stop Rossi from developing and promoting his technology, there is no evidence of that. They had a right of first offer as to licenses elsewhere, but this could not harm him, it would give him more money if they exercised it. He could have installed a high-power reactor in Sweden, years ago, if he had one. The one who has stopped Rossi, if he has anything real, is Rossi.
Rossi created the Doral test that he slaved away at. He is now claiming that it was uncomfortably hot. Did he claim that during the year? Did anyone else report that? The entire idea of a 1 MW test was Rossi’s, this is not what any engineer would want. Apparently IH offered to pay him to not do it. He refused. Rossi did not use lawyers for what they are good for, negotiations. He only used Annesser to threaten and then to sue. My guess is that Annesser encouraged that, leading his client down the road to ruin.
PS. Just wish me356 has taken a good read on this case and keep cool and stay far away of such business partners.
I see no evidence other than “me356 Says” that me356 has anything real. Maybe he does. Maybe not. I decided, by 2011 or 2012, that the future of LENR could not depend on speculations and secret commercial ventures (like Rossi), that we needed a “Plan B,” which I identified as encouraging basic scientific research.
I see IH as a partner in that effort, willing to work with other players, so far, at least. I expect genuine commercial efforts to be secret, and I expect science to be open. The two, mixed, become mixed-up, because there arise conflicts of interest. LENRIA, Nagel’s organization, may have a role to play here.
They are talking about me on LENR Forum again. While the history of my ban there is quite open, if one studies history on LF and looks at what I wrote here about it when it happened, it’s obvious that few actually know the history. LF Staff are far from transparent, which is a major part of the problem.
Let’s start with this: the Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS) community needs to develop what are called, in my training, Structures for Fulfillment. From the beginning, the community was fragmented and ineffective, compared to what might be seen as possible. When I came into the field in 2009, I found no evidence of sane collective decision-making procedures that were anything more than ad hoc. Fund-raising was isolated and largely individual. Factions were fighting with each other, but aside from a few highly opinionated individuals, internal criticism was mostly missing. Experts in CMNS did not criticise the work of others, they would not even comment on it (and I asked).
I saw, in CMNS conferences, no mechanisms for finding and expressing consensus. So, from a social point of view, it was all primitive, and mostly the community was reactive, blaming the lack of progress on “them,” the mainstream refusing to accept experimental reality. But how was that reality being communicated? Was it effective and clear? Were experts in communication being sought, either as paid consultants or as volunteers?
Mostly not. Something was missing, and, since I could see it, it became my responsibility to create it. So, now, to LF. This will be long, because many complex issues are raised. Part of the problem is an intolerance of complexity. Complexity is not for everyone, but what I’ve found, many times, is that those who hate complexity will act to suppress it, even though they could simply step around it. What we do not understand, we try to kill, it is probably a basic survival instinct, xenophobia.
In a sane organizational structure, complexity is channeled. In an insane one, it is repressed, censored, or at least ridiculed and insulted. Continue reading “Abd on Abd as the Center of the Universe”
And Rends does it again, making claims with a link to a document that does not show what he claims. This one was a familiar point to it, and I thought for a few minutes that I’d made some big mistake with what I’d written before. Instead, there is another explanation.
On LENR Forum, Rends wrote: (Abd emphasis)
The heat exchanger story is a good example, as the IH expert Rick A. Smith has shown in his report by means of photographs, there was this serpentine heat exchanger, just as Rossi has described it to Wong. What sense should the installation of this heat exchanger make, if the Ecat plant does not work? Because according to the agreements between IH and JM Products, no IH personal would have been allowed to take a look into the black box. This heat exchanger makes sense only if heat is actually produced, if this was all a fake, this installation would have been completely unnecessary.
https://thenewfire.files.wordp…_1_to_15_ocr.pdf#page=136 Continue reading “Agreement written with vanishing ink”
I had recently seen a sane post from Rends and so, I thought, maybe he is learning. And then I saw this exchange today.
On LENR Forum, Rends wrote:
It is not about faith but about facts.
Great. However, Rends proceeds to mix fact and fantasies, his own or some, perhaps, shared with Planet Rossi. “Fantasy” is not a synonym for “error,” but rather distinguishes fact from what we make facts mean. Science, in general, is a collection of experimental reports (generally, “fact”) plus interpretive relationships that have been shown to be useful for prediction of future findings and experience. These are not fact, they are fantasy, and an ontological or epistemological error is made when they are considered fact. They can be highly useful, but if considered fact, they can inhibit change and growth. Rather, fantasies are useful or they are not. That, itself, is a fantasy, by the way, mine.
This ontology might seem to create an endless regression, but, in actual practice, it does not. The sky does not fall when we recognize our favorite beliefs as being fantasies, once we get over the impression that fantasy is Bad. Fantasy is incredibly useful, when distinguished.
So, the rest of Rends’ comments:
Fact is, there are several reports and expert opinions (such as the Lugano Report, the Penon Report, the Wong Opinion etc.pp.), which are mentioned in this court proceedings, from respected scientists, who confirm that the 1MW Ecat Plant works, Cherokee Investment Partner has only two technicians that make assumptions without having ever tested the system itself.
What a mess!
Fact:
There are two reports, allegedly by experts, mentioned in the Court Proceedings. The Penon Report allegedly confirms that the “1 MW Plant works.” The Wong report does not. Wong was hired to critique the Smith and Murray expected testimonies, and Wong claims to find that certain criticisms are not well-founded. He does not opine on whether or not the Plant “worked.”
There is the Lugano Report, which is not an expert opinion, these “respected professors” — that’s a Planet Rossi trope and is common among pseudoscientists — were not expert in the necessary field, calorimetry by using thermal imaging — so behind this opinion is a set of held assumptions, beliefs, or fantasies, that are not explicitly distinguished. The Lugano report and all the other reports do not “confirm that the 1 MW Plant works.” It would not do that even if it were not riddled with errors.
Only one set of people have thoroughly tested the E-cat technology where Rossi did not effectively control the process, and that is Industrial Heat. The flaws in Lugano and prior reports (such as that by Kullander and Essen) were well-known and widely discussed, long before this trial.
Then, Rends repeats the Planet Rossi trope, part of the general conspiracy theory that Rends supported in the past, that the LENR investment and control is in the hands of Cherokee. None of the evidence supports that. Rends converts the fact that Darden is CEO of Cherokee into a claim that Cherokee is in control. It is much more “factual” that Darden is in control (of both), but as CEO, Darden is responsible to the investors who own the various Cherokee entities.
I have seen no evidence that Cherokee invested anything more than a de minimus allowance for Darden to use Cherokee facilities, such as a mail drop, and Fogleman is CFO of Cherokee and provided services to IH and IPH.
Cherokee did not invest in IH, outside of these services, and it is possible that Cherokee was reimbursed for them. (I recall some evidence to that effect, but it’s not important enough to research right now.) This was all de minimus. The Agreement was explicit, and included an Entire Agreement clause that disallowed any reliance on verbal assurances, which may have been actually misleading, or which may have been merely misunderstood, and the latter, given how we have seen Rossi interpret known fact, seems quite possible. Entire Agreement clauses are written and included, as standard practice, precisely to avoid, years later, arguments over he said, she said.
And there is Cherokee Investment Partners, Thomas Darden et.al., who by all means try to get the entire IP of LENR Technology world-wide under their control with an impenetrable network of sham companies, where they do not even know themselves, witch management position they have inside this companies.
So again Rends is building a conceptual structure based on the Cherokee fantasy. There is no “impenetrable structure,” though there is privacy. For LENR investments, there is IHHI, a U.K. limited liability company, with controlling interests in the hands of Darden, Mazzarin0 (a long-time Cherokee officer), and Vaughn, who put in personal investments. That’s about control. Woodford invested $50 million, receiving preferred stock, and apparently committed $150 more if needed (as, for example, if IH had decided to accept the Doral demonstration as real and to pay Rossi in spite of the flaws — which testimony shows was their intention. That is, if they were satisfied. If not, blood from a turnip. Without solid evidence, independent, such that IH could then present it to investors (such as Woodford) to raise the $89 million to satisfy Rossi, paying Rossi was impossible. The limit of the Cherokee friends to personally raise, absent that clear evidence, was probably about $20 million.
IHHI is the sole owner of IH. IPH is a shell, holding IP, wholly owned by IH, and operated by IH. This is not a complicated structure. IH appears to be the operating company. This all seems fairly standard to me. To those who mistrust standard social structures, it seems like some highly suspicious mystification. Darden et al are venture capitalists, but with a twist: they are examples of such capitalists who seek to create activity that benefits the world, “socially responsible investment.” It’s quite appealing. But those who distrust the entire capitalist system see it from a jaundiced perspective, and the profit motive is seen as disgusting and highly reprehensible. Unless, of course, it’s Rossi who wants to make a profit. Think of the children with cancer!
IH has not attempted to “get [under control] the entire IP technology of LENR world-wide.” However, they clearly seek to cooperate with all players willing to cooperate with them. Some of their investments are under NDA, as is common with venture capital. However, there are major initiatives that have no connection with IH, funded well by other sources.
Darden et al. wanted to prevent with restraint tactics that it comes to the long-term test and they have tried with contract trickery to get out of the obligation of paying 89 million dollars.
What Rends is claiming does not fit with the disclosed facts in the case. “Fact,” legally, includes sworn testimony, and such will be accepted as fact unless contradicted. In a Motion for Summary Judgment, how a judge handles apparent contradiction would generally, be, my opinion, to seek to interpret the testimonies such that both are true. I.e, what underlying facts would allow both testimonies to be sincere, as to underlying fact, merely, perhaps, interpreted or interpretable in differing ways. A Judge could also decide that the weight of evidence in the case is strong enough to consider specific testimony false, self-serving, conclusory, or even perhaps perjury (presenting willfully misleading allegations of fact). But this is not a criminal trial.
Rends is here presenting his own fantasies as if they were fact. We will see that he then gives “evidence.” However, there is a vast body of material now available. If one holds some conclusion as true, in such a body of evidence, one will almost always be able to find some cherry-picked piece that could appear to support the conclusion. This is why, in civil cases, the standard of judgment is not “proof,” but “preponderance of the evidence.” This requires weighing all the evidence, and, in practice, in the U.S. court system, this is an adversarial process, it being assumed that both sides are represented by competent counsel, able to present all that is relevant for their points of view. I see no sign that Rends has, in fact, reviewed all the evidence. I have briefly seen, as a minimum, all of it, within certain narrow areas of the case and intend to complete this and present comparisons between the “IH story” and the “Rossi story” — and also for the third-party defendants.
Regardless of the evidence Rends may have seen, what he is presenting here is not fact, but interpretation, i.e., fantasy or belief or faith. However, I don’t use “faith” to mean “belief.” Faith is not about fact, it is a condition of trust, and, ideally, is unconditional, not dependent on fact. It is an organizing principle for behavior and can be highly useful, as long as it is not confused with fact.
All this was anticipated by Rossi and together with his lawyers and so they staged this fake event with JM-Products, to give Rossi the possibility to fulfill the contractual obligations, ie the long-term test, because Rossi could have waited for ever that Cherokee Investment Partner presented him the promised own customer and thus he would never have been able to fulfill the contract.
Here, Rends is asserting Johnson as “Rossi’s lawyers.” And what Rends is claiming here, if shown in court, is open and shut that Rossi fraudulently misrepresented the JMP situation, converting a contemplated long-term test (under full IH control, monitored by Rossi, instead of the reverse) into a Rossi-dominated and controlled faux test. Rossi had many other options, if IH (not Cherokee) had unreasonably delayed. In fact, though, the time for the GPT did expire and the attempt by Rossi and IH to extend the time failed because Rossi’s former U.S. licensee deliberately refused to sign it, and Rossi knew that and so did IH. IH, however, would have greatly preferred that Rossi stage a genuine test, and as long as they could monitor the test, as needed, it may have been acceptable to them. Rossi’s lawyer tried to present this, questioning an IH officer, as about the closing of an opportunity to earn the $89 million, but that was never closed. Rather, Rossi wanted to force IH to pay, without actually satisfying IH, while the ability of IH to pay was dependent on actual satisfaction, not merely what had guided their former behavior, to allow a possibility of success. Rossi attempts, then, to turn this into some vaguely reprehensible behavior, that they “didn’t tell him” of their problems. That contradicts sworn testimony, in fact. Rossi knew, but demanded complete control. When he excluded the IH engineer, Murray, in July, 2015, less than half-way through the test, it was sealed: IH could not possibly accept that test, regardless of the rest.
They were, effectively, willing to allow the possibility of a “fake customer,” if the actual test was clear enough, conclusive enough. IH was operating under multiple possibilities, one of which was that Rossi had a real technology, but was failing to disclose it fully, which is actually consistent with some Rossi testimony and pleadings. So maybe if there was a demonstration showing 1 MW, at high COP, they could then put pressure on Rossi to disclose it to them, and they would then give Rossi that money, or perhaps even more.
These are my interpretations, coming from a combination of the review of the evidence that I’ve been engaged in for the better part of a year, now, as well as my understanding of the field (LENR) and how venture capitalists — the best kind, called “angel investors” — operate.
Darden et al. were never interested in working with Rossi as an industrial partner, they wanted to get his IP and, above all, the formula for his fuel as quickly and cheaply as possible and then award licenses to other contract partners from the big industry and thereby become dizzying rich.
No sane investor would want to work with Rossi as an “industrial partner.” He is famously impossible to work with. If the Rossi technology were real, yes, they would then present the independent evidence they had gathered, the clear proof that devices made by the disclosed technology worked, and use it to sell sublicenses to manufacturing companies. Without that evidence, they could be committing fraud. These guys, however, are already quite “rich” by ordinary standards. IHHI expects to spend all the investment and to need more, before they have a dime of profit. There is no evidence that IH or the related companies have made a dime of revenue, so far.
At the end Rossi would have been still a marginal figure in this game.
Rossi would lose control, of about half the world market. That’s what IH was proposing to pay for, and Rossi had said that he would sell his secret for $100 million. So that is what they offered him. Did he sell his secret? What is really strange for me to see is Planet Rossi opinion that the technology was real, but Rossi did not disclose it, because IH was a collection of snakes out to steal his technology without paying fully for it. This theory — which does appear to match Rossi’s ideas (considering Murray as a “spy,” for example) — actually would completely justify IH’s refusal to pay, and, further, their counterclaims for breach of contract. It is as if the idea of Rossi Effect Reality cancels all other considerations. Call this the Peter Gluck Effect.
THHuxleynew wrote:
[a sober analysis of the Rends post. It contains a minor typographical error, obvious, referring to IH counsel as “Rossi’s lawyer.” THH mentions much of what I wrote above.]
[a clumsily edited presentation of a piece of evidence. Rends is an LF moderator, but does not have high forum editing skills, or isn’t careful about quotation.] What he gives is this, and I have corrected his misuse of the LF quotation facility:
THHuxleynew wrote:
The points above are not facts.
Quote [I.e., this is Rends’ presentation not that of THH]
“Our primary work now focuses on intellectual property development and on developing business partnerships. We want to acquire other technology rights and to find deployment partners that can implement. We want to see LENR technologies developed by larger, more sophisticated companies. We have visited two large technology-based manufacturing businesses to discuss limited, research-based licenses. We have traded drafts of such an agreement with one, and it appears they will sign something acceptable to us. Under the discussed terms, they will assess our technology both theoretically and through testing. They will have no rights to the technology, or very limited rights, and they will have to create a limited internal group with restricted access to information. That group will not share their knowledge or work on other LENR projects. IH will get their data and engineering work. Either of us can stop the process at any time. We have been contacted by several of Rossi’s unhappy licensees from outside our geographic territory. We generally have avoided such conversations. But this is happening because people see us as an aggregator of LENR technologies and a friendly supporter, which is consistent with reality and helpful to us. Our long term goal is to gather these technologies and researchers and get the technology out to others who can implement and do further research.” (Thomas Darden)
https://thenewfire.files.wordp…nd_3_exhibits.pdf#page=17
The link does not visibly reference the case document number (though it is in the fiull URL), but it does — kudos to Rends — at least give the page number, but that won’t work, because the file automatically downloads (at least for me.) This is a 8.2 MB file. I have started to warn users about large files on the Docket. They are crazy large, and I’m not sure why. I consider that sloppy legal work, slowing access to documents. In this case, though, thenewfire has combined smaller documents to make a large one. The actual file quoted is 167-2. (Rends’ page 17, of course, refers to the combined pdf page, not the page numbering within the file, . Every case document has headers giving the file access name and, if relevant, the attachment number and specific page number.)
page 17 in the file Rends provided is not where the quotation is taken from. Rends’ quote has been mangled, pieces are put together without indicating this with ellipses, and it is out of sequence.
This is the original case document in our archive:
0167.2_Exhibit_1 Email from Darden to Sloan, 3/7/2014 (OCR’d version)
We happen to have an OCR’d version. (Many Rossi documents are pure image, one reason why they are so large.) This, however, doesn’t have page anchors, so from our actual court PDF:
Conclusion
We are all feeling anxious these days because we are in the middle of a very public test. The early results have been positive, which is a relief especially when compared to how we were feeling about the probability of success right before the test began. However, we are completely reserving judgment regarding the output, waiting to see the data and the Swedish professors’ conclusions.
Our primary work now focuses on intellectual property development and on developing business partnerships. We want to acquire other technology rights and to find deployment partners that can implement. We want to see LENR technologies developed by larger, more sophisticated companies.
Please reach out with any questions or comments. I would like to meet with any of you to discuss IH at any time, and I would enjoy getting the benefit of your insights. Thank you for your support.
This document was largely about the Lugano test. What Darden wrote in the bolded paragraph, with which Rends begins his quotation, as to “intellectual property development” was building and testing devices as instructed by Rossi — and with their own modifications, it appears, on occasion. They did not want to become a major manufacturer, nor even a major research organization. They wanted to develop business partnerships, which makes complete sense, given that facilitating business relationships is what venture capitalists best do.
Above that, though, was
Licensing
We have visited two large technology-based manufacturing businesses to discuss limited, research-based licenses. We have traded drafts of such an agreement with one, and it appears they will sign something acceptable to us. Under the discussed terms, they will assess our technology both theoretically and through testing. They will have no rights to the technology, or very limited rights, and they will have to create a limited internal group with restricted access to information. That group will not share their knowledge or work on other LENR projects. IH will get their data and engineering work. Either of us can stop the process at any time.
… [then there is lengthy material in this line, not quoted by Rends, but making it clearer. This is about how to protect intellectual property while encouraging and creating broader cooperation, something that Rossi never figured out, and hated. To Rossi, this was all considered disclosing his secrets to “competitors.” Such as Texas Instruments.]
We have been contacted by several of Rossi’s unhappy licensees from outside our geographic territory. We generally have avoided such conversations. But this is happening because people see us as an aggregator of LENR technologies and a friendly supporter, which is consistent with reality and helpful to us. Our long term goal is to gather these technologies and researchers and get the technology out to others who can implement and do further research.
By cherry-picking, changing sequence, and then by highly biased interpretation, Rends seems to imagine that what he quoted supports what he had claimed, as if no explanation is needed, it’s obvious. I don’t doubt his sincerity, what I doubt is his competence. This kind of quotation would never be tolerated in academic writing, it would be a career-killer.
Do this on Wikipedia, one could be warned, and if this was repeated, one’s account could be blocked or banned. But on LF, Rends is a moderator and was protected against frank critique by Alan Smith.
Rends
Would you care to extract the part of your post supported by that quote from the rest? I’d agree with it then…
I think you can support:
And there is Cherokee Investment Partners, Thomas Darden et.al., who by all means try to get the entire IP of LENR Technology world-wide under their control with an impenetrable network of sham companies, where they do not even know themselves, witch management position they have inside this companies.
And directly contradicting the implication you make, from your own quote:
Our long term goal is to gather these technologies and researchers and get the technology out to others who can implement and do further research.” (Thomas Darden)
IH has a long-term goal of breaking LENR out into the mainstream, it’s obvious. They have a plan that would place them in a prime position to profit from it, as well, but this is highly speculative, and they know that. From the scope of their investments, and from their relationship to other serious supporters of LENR, there is nothing in the business report written by Darden to indicate the kind of greedy agenda that Rends is promoting, though I also find the attempted condemnation IH for greed — because they were considering careful IP protection — while tolerating Rossi’s obsession with secrecy for the same reason (to keep it for himself) — to be hypocritical. IH Fanboy, at least, recognizes that part of the equation. Rossi was a terrible business “partner,” and even if he has a real technology, may have created conditions for rejection or worse.
However, given the pattern of lies that has been uncovered, most of the evidence for reality has vanished. It used to be that the strongest evidence for a real Rossi Effect, as assessed by the LENR public, and especially the LENR scientists involved, was the IH investment. What happened to that?
Apparent rule on internet fora: never admit error, even if it is completely obvious. On Planet Rossi, this is totally routine, and we can see this in the lawsuit, in the arguments over “Statements of Material Fact.” IH states Fact A, which is plain and clear and incontrovertible. Rossi replies “Disputed.” And then actually confirms Fact A, but adds alleged Facts B and C. The goal is to avoid implications from Fact A. There is a complete loss of distinction between fact and interpretation. Lawyers are trained to understand the difference (as are scientists, if the training is good).
So, Rends keeps arguing that he’s right, not admitting one single point, and it is behavior like this that makes LF weak compared with what it could possibly be.
THHuxleynew wrote:
And directly contradicting the implication you make, from your own quote:
Our long term goal is to gather these technologies and researchers and get the technology out to others who can implement and do further research.” (Thomas Darden)
Quote
“They will have no rights to the technology, or very limited rights, and they will have to create a limited internal group with restricted access to information. That group will not share their knowledge or work on other LENR projects. IH will get their data and engineering work.”(Thomas Darden)
By quoting out of context, Rends makes it appear that this “they will have no rights” is about general activity in the field. This is actually about a specific conversation with one specific research partner, a company that could possibly become a competitor, and this is classic, as to how to broaden cooperation while preserving IP rights. Rends is not presenting fact, but interpretation, and warped interpretation to boot. Understanding the distinction between fact and opinion or interpretation is crucial not only to law but to science and even to understanding life and living powerfully.
That is the strategy of Cherokee Investment Partners and it is all about Cherokee Investment Partners, when Thomas Darden acts it is for Cherokee Investment Partners even if they build up dozens of mocking companies structures in US and overseas (which he himself loses the overview), to hide it:
No, there is a clear distinction, legally and practically, between the acts of an individual as an individual and the acts of that same person as an officer of a corporation. It appears that Rossi may not have understood this, though there is a paradox: he seems to believe that it mattered what hat he was wearing, i.e., Rossi the person, Rossi the owner of Leonardo Corporation, or Rossi the Director of JM Products, and, in fact, Rossi seriously blurred all these roles. Darden did not, apparently. The interest in LENR appears to have been personal. Darden’s Cherokee partners tolerated it and perhaps even supported it, but Cherokee was kept separate, and, in spite of diligent effort, Rossi’s attorneys were unable, so far, to show any Cherokee investment in IH or IHHI. It was personal money from two Cherokee officers (Darden and Mazzarino), plus Vaughn (who is not a major Cherokee officer, in spite of some claims), and people like Dewey Weaver. Majority control of IHHI, the current corporate parent, is with those Cherokee people, but not Cherokee as a corporation, which is responsible to all its investors even if controlled by Darden.
There is no understanding of how corporations work, here, and that is typical of Planet Rossi, it follows Rossi’s ignorance, an ignorance that resulted, even under the best assumptions, in his being powerless in Italy against opposition. There were apparently major corporations that wanted to support him, but he rejected them because he did not trust them. Deja vu all over again.
Quote
Q:You say you’re currently working for Cherokee Investment Partners; is that correct?
A:Yes.
Q:Is there — are you an owner of that company?
A:Yes, I am an owner of that company.
Q:What percentage ownership do you have?
A:I think it’s 56 percent.
This is true, and completely irrelevant. This was all known, at least in approximate outlines, before Rossi v. Darden. Cherokee has a set of owners, i.e., shareholders. IH had a different set of owners. And IHHI is likewise different. Cherokee does have a practice of starting independent LLCs. It will invest, according to sources, about $25 million to start one, and then the LLC will raise additional capital. In that case, Cherokee becomes a part owner of the LLC. These are generally risky investments in environmental remediation. Many of them fail. When they fail, Cherokee loses their investment, but is not on the hook for debts beyond that. This is how corporations work, “limited liability.” Shareholders are not generally responsible for the debts of a company, and anyone doing business with a corporation must understand this. Any attorney would have told Rossi this, if he’d consulted about the Agreement with IH. If IH makes no money from the Rossi investment, if the technology is not actually transferred, and if IH cannot attract additional investment, Rossi would not get his $89 million even if the “GPT” were perfect and properly done.
IH was not a Cherokee LLC. It was distinct. Cherokee did not invest in it. Individuals, some of whom were investors in Cherokee, or officers, did invest. This is all utterly unsurprising. Darden raises capital from friends, initially.
In the legal arguments, Rossi attorneys are arguing that technology transfer was not a requirement of the Agreement. That’s a narrow and disengenuous argument, as IH counsel is showing. In a practical sense, technology transfer, successful, was essential or the Agreement would fail, IH would be unable to pay. Darden and Vaughn and Cherokee were not on the hook, at all, and this was simple standard corporate business practice. Rossi’s attempt to pierce the corporate veil was actually quite premature. If Rossi had prevailed on a simple breach of contract claim, then, if IH had been unable to pay, he might have sued anyone who unjustly profited — except nobody profited, and finding investment is not profit, legally. It is similar to borrowing money, which isn’t profit.
https://thenewfire.files.wordp…_1_to_42_ocr.pdf#page=210
The page number doesn’t survive into my system. I suspect that Rends might be reading those files from within his own blog. That is a combined document, 16.9 MB. These page references do not distinguish the original source files, from PACER and could become useless if the blog copies disappear. The page references here will work for any copy of the court pdfs.
The source is 214-10 page 12 which would be cited, in case documents, as DE 214, Exhibit 9, and the deposition page is 16, and this is all totally routine and unsurprising.
…and for an owner of such a big investment company is there a lot of “I don’t remember” in this deposition!
That’s an interpretation, not a fact. (It’s a comparison between a summary fact and some kind of expectation of what would be normal, though how Rends would know what is normal for the CEO of a $2.2 billion company is beyond me. It seems he expects every detail to be clear. If Rends actually wanted to look at fact, he would compile a list of all the “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” references for Darden, and then compare them with the depositions of others. The underlying facts here are public record. There were no “I don’t know”s on that page. Rends is terminally sloppy, and not a serious writer.
And then Rends has, with no explanation:
https://thenewfire.files.wordp…_1_to_42_ocr.pdf#page=199
Page 99 of that combined OCR document is the License Agreement, so … WTF?
And then Rends brings up the Chinese trip of Darden, as if this were new and relevant. It’s all part of the Planet Rossi trope, reflecting Rossi himself, that the Chinese invested hundreds of millions of dollars in IH. They certainly did not. There is some possibility, I would imagine, that a Chinese company was started, with IH cooperation, but it would be owned and controlled by Chinese, almost certainly. This is total fluff, completely off-topic.
[similarly to the above]
THHuxleynew wrote:
if you read your quote carefully:
I would advice you to read the court papers carefully:
He might take his own advice. He is projecting his own meanings all over them. They are not there with any clarity, and some are directly contradictory to established fact. Once in a while, someone debating like this on LF will actually look again and say “Oops!” Somehow we have it in our heads that this is defeat, because we think of the discussions as battles. In fact, saying “I was wrong” actually makes us, to the people who count, look good. So often we have it all backwards. And then we have the opportunity to thank someone for pointing out our mistakes. That makes us look really, really good! Even if the person who did it was being a total jerk. Take this from a 30-year on-line discussion veteran.
Quote
Q.· ·By whom are you currently employed?
A.· ·I work for Cherokee Investment Partners. I also work on behalf of a number of the different venture deals that we’ve invested in.
https://thenewfire.files.wordp…_1_to_42_ocr.pdf#page=203
Again, this is 214-10 pdf page 5, document page 9. Rends, here, misreads the meaning. Who is “we”? Here he is speaking for Cherokee, which has created many ventures. IH is not a Cherokee venture, that’s quite clear. I will, below, explain what likely happened that led Rossi to think he was dealing with Cherokee. It’s understandable, but any attorney would have set him straight. And what is truly shocking is that Annesser did not set him straight, but fed the flames. For fun and profit?
One of these Investment is IH or better the mocking parade (Industrial Heat LLC, IPH International BV, IPHBV Holdings, IH Holdings International) “It’s a complicated structure” (Thomas Darden)
No, that was not what he was referring to, because Cherokee did not start them, Darden and Mazzarino did, using their own money, apparently. (Even if Cherokee money was transiently used, which I have not seen, that would have been a loan to the partners, almost certainly, for which they were personally responsible to Cherokee, not an investment by Cherokee in IH, which was a venture entirely outside of ordinary Cherokee business, and other partners would then have had a cause of action against Darden. Not something he would want to do!
Quote
Q.· ·Do you have several e-mail addresses?
A.· ·Yes.
Q.· ·Can you please provide those.
A.· ·Tdarden@industrialheatco, tdarden@cherokeefund.com, tfdarden@aol.com, tfdarden@yahoo.com.
And this is meaningless, it only shows that Darden has email addresses at these companies, which is utterly no surprise and which has no legal significance other than showing involvement.
So if you as an owner of an investment company are working for your own investment what do you call it?
It is called having one’s own life and investments in addition to working for a company. An officer on the level of Darden may have many such involvements, and if the other partners are okay with them, there is no problem. If the other partners are not okay with them, then there may be a problem to be resolved, between them. Only if there is, say, tax fraud, would there be a larger legal problem.
A company is not obligated by the actions of an officer if these are maintained as distinct, and by creating the Agreement as between Rossi, AEG, Leonardo, and IH, with an Entire Agreement clause, Darden clearly protected Cherokee, and the shocking thing here is that Annesser filed a lawsuit disregarding these legal basics, and that continued because fact was misrepresented in the Complaint. That’s gonna cause some damage for Rossi, for sure, and possibly for Annesser and Silver Law Group.
Could you define mocking parade?
I accept that Darden works for both Cherokee and IH, and that Cherokee have invested in IH. As have Woodward.
Darden does work for both Cherokee and IH. However, Cherokee has not invested in IH. Woodford also has not invested in IH, but closer: Woodford invested in IH Holdings International, Ltd (IHHI), which is the sole owner of IH, having bought all the IH shares, paying with IHHI stock. THH, be careful. This is actually an important point in the lawsuit. Rossi claimed that Cherokee owned IH, even claimed it was the sole owner, but this was never true. There is some evidence that I have not yet reviewed about how payments were actually made. However, Cherokee owns no IH or IHHI stock, there is a complete list of investors on the U.K. corporation site. Rends thinks this is all hidden, but it’s actually quite open. I first started discussing the situation when Sifferkoll commented on LF with a completely incorrect analysis of the UK corporation figures. He did not understand the documents correctly. (Woodford bought preferred stock, valued at $45 per share, whereas other stock had a par value of $0.01 per share. Woodford was not buying control and clearly trusted Darden et al. They were investing in a long-term project, and not expecting any quick profits, if any profits at all.
The business purpose of IHHI is not much understood. It is really getting feet wet, becoming active in a field that they are betting will eventually become profitable. They would want to be ready, they would want to make any mistakes now, with relatively small sums at stake, instead of later, when it might be billions of dollars at risk.
Would you like to answer my point about external research companies? Without such restrictions, how could IH validate LENR technology? It is far from what you interpret, and sort of necessary for anyone except Rossi who does not validate technology.
THH keeps trying to create a sane conversation.
THHuxleynew wrote:
Could you define mocking parade?
Formation of a company braid to for pretending of size and cover-up of responsibilities.
That’s incoherent English. He may have meant “charade” (third meaning). There is no cover-up, and no pretense of size. IH was created and funded with an initial stock offering that raised an immediate $11.5 million to be paid to Rossi, with a total stock offering apparently at $20 million. “Cover-up” of responsibilities could possible be based on a claim that Cherokee was “really” responsible, but that is a dead claim that only survived in the lawsuit because Rossi had claimed (or at least implied) that Cherokee was the sole owner of IH, which was far from the truth. This was an ordinary setup of an LLC for a specific venture. What is shown by the Planet Rossi tropes around this, the Sifferkollian conspiracy theories, is the ignorance of the denizens of that planet, including Rossi himself, who, if he was sincere in his claims, showed radical ignorance of legal and business basics.
THHuxleynew wrote:
I accept that Darden works for both Cherokee and IH, and that Cherokee have invested in IH. As have Woodward.
This is quibbling!
And this is spit.
THH attempts to be conciliatory, and Rends complains. What Rends is doing is continually moving the goalposts, it’s called. Rends claims A. THH points out a problem with A. So Rends claims B and C, not addressing the problem with A. So THH addresses those alleged facts, and then Rends alleges D and E and F. This is how fanatics argue. This is not the behavior of those who seek learning and cooperation. It is how Rossi thinks, in fact, and is very much how Rossi’s counsel is arguing his case, in the MSJs.
There is a vast universe of possible points to be made, but if one never focuses on specifics, all that is created is confusion. Rends shows no sign of following the arguments in the case, but only his own ideas and reactions to details he thinks important, and mostly these are about impressions confirming his belief that IH is a bunch of scuzzy thieves. Even if the bulk of the evidence in the trial, admissible evidence, shows something quite different.
THHuxleynew wrote:
Would you like to answer my point about external research companies? Without such restrictions, how could IH validate LENR technology? It is far from what you interpret, and sort of necessary for anyone except Rossi who does not validate technology.
Now, notice that Rends does not actually answer, other than a misunderstanding of the point. I would express “validate” as “obtain independent validation,” which would need to be validation independent, not only of Rossi, but of IH as well. In order to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars without risking investment fraud claims, they would need that. And they appear to have taken steps to do that, with Rossi generally complaining about it.
The plant was, so to speak, in its possession, on Cherokees land in Raleigh North Carolina.
Yes (though I don’t know about “Cherokees land,” the Plant was in the possession of IH, but Rossi was there, working for them for a year. It is not clear that Rossi was doing what the agreement contemplated, i.e., ensuring technology transfer. Darden complains about this in one document.
The indications are in what I’ve seen so far that Rossi refused to start the test, or a meaningful alternative, and wanted to focus on improvements.
Why did they do not perform a long-term test there, as foreseen in the agreement with Rossi and instead try to develop other devices, that are of no value to Rossi, but only for Darden et.al. (see above, how they tread other partners)?
Again, Rends has not realized that the “above” comment was only about a specific situation, with a commercial partner who could possibly be a competitor. What happens in Rends’ mind is that all this is mashed up and fit into a mold in which he believes.
Notice, again, the moving target. Instead of focusing on one issue, where resolution and at least some kind of agreement might be possible, Rends keeps asserting more alleged facts. The case documents explain why that “long-term” test did not happen. Maybe Rends would benefit by actually studying them and learning. How would IH answer the question? If one doesn’t know how a major party would answer a question like that, one doesn’t know the case. Any neutral analyst — or partisan analyst who wants to also see matters from the other side, which any good attorney would want to do — would know that Rends is telling the story from one side only, mostly the Rossi side, though he does stray from that below.
Because they have not found a customer? Ridiculous!
Of course. But they did find a customer and Rossi refused to cooperate, and instead argued that the “customer” he’d found in Florida would be much better. And he obviously created the impression that this was Johnson Matthey, based on many, many evidences, and on that I have seen what is the strongest evidence of perjury that I have noticed in the case.
Darden et al. did not want to pay the 89 million, that is the only reason.
That is a fantasy contrary to all the evidence in the case, other than the obvious fact: given the conditions that had arise, for many reasons, they were not going to consider Doral a GPT and pay. That is not a reason why they didn’t run the GPT. Rossi has made a big fuss over them not explicitly, in writing, telling them that Doral was not the GPT, until the beginning of December, 2015, but Rossi never told them, in writing, that it was, much before then. Nor did Rossi ever demand that the GPT start in North Carolina. We have seen no documents where he complained about the delay.
The entire concept of the GPT, though, was Rossi’s, and all the difficulties with the Validation Test and the later GPT were created by his crazy idea of a megawatt plant based on a hundred units that were not, themselves, thoroughly tested. One device design, tested exhaustively and independently, generating ten or twenty kilowatts, would have been worth the $100 million or more, and IH showed, over and over, that they were seeking that, and the Rossi claim of fraud, that they never intended to pay, is entirely contradictory to the evidence available in the case.
They had it long time in their hands to test the plant under self-chosen scientific criteria, with self-chosen experts, extensively according to the agreements and have not done it.
We do not know what they did, whether they fired up the plant or tested individual reactors from it. Perhaps there is evidence in one of the depositions, but it appears that IH attempts to test the technology did exist and, in spite of some initial results that more or less followed Rossi’s demonstrations (and probably used similar heat verification technology, they found no confirmed excess heat, or certainly, if any, far less than required.
What seems likely at this point is either that Rossi was a fraud from the start, or that he found ways of measuring power, and fooled himself with them. The possibility of the system being “flooded” was pointed out in 2011, so this was not new. So if we want to create “why not”s,
Why was the Rossi Doral test not explicitly designed to address that and other possibilities?
Why was it necessary to create a secret customer process, so that there could not be independently verified measure of plant output, by seeing how the power was dissipated?
IH was claiming inability to confirm performance. Why did Rossi not work carefully with them to insure that they were applying the technology correctly? Were there differences of opinion about how to measure heat? We know that Rossi and socks still claim that the Lugano test was correct. It would have been trivial to address those problems with independent measures. Why was this not done?
Rossi’s test in Florida is, of course, not a clean thing in the sense of a proper business deal, but under the given circumstances, at least an explicable organizational act that is even not denied by Rossi in his deposition in court.
It was denied until the evidence became overwhelming and he’d have had to perjure himself to continue his own charade. Rossi clearly lied to obtain the agreement to move the Plant to Doral. Rends may think this “explicable,” and it is, but only if we imagine an utterly incompetent and greedy Rossi who thinks like Rends. Rossi does actually state that he was desperate to get a test going. The consequence of deciding to lie in order to accomplish that goal is that the scheme fails badly, he could lose everything.
But here we have to separate precisely, between the business on the one hand side and the test results of the plant and the evaluations and the report of Penon on the other.
Who is “we” and why do we “have to” do what Rends suggests? Rossi v. Darden is the subject of the LF thread. Rends wants to talk about the plant performance, but the data we have on the Plant performance has all been contaminated by the participation and control of Rossi, now known clearly to be willing to mislead and deceive.
And Rends is avoiding directly engaging with THH, but instead keeps adding new considerations. This kind of behavior is why many LF discussions go nowhere. It’s terminally fuzzy thinking. THH knows, and wants something better. He is welcome here.
To say that the report must be faulty, or even preposterous, is not the solution, because with the means available to us from the outside, we simply do not have the possibility to produce evidence and therefore it is all but a presumption.
Rends is neglecting fact, when he began this excursion by claiming to point to it. We have facts, now, about the Doral circumstances and conditions, and many facts that do, actually, relate to plant performance, but absent a willingness to do the work of careful analysis — distinguishing established fact from merely claims — agreement will be elusive.
The discussion went on, and may, indeed, go on and on. However, I promised to give my theory of how the idea arose that IH was Cherokee.
Back in 2012, Rossi apparently tossed Darden out of his office, not interested in talking with him, but then found out that Darden was the principal officer of Cherokee Investment Partners, a $2.2 billion corporation. That got his interest.
Darden spoke of “we” without being very specific. Cherokee had gotten him in the door — and this was reasonable, this was not some random bozo with merely a few million at most to invest. Darden took no steps to distinguish his activity from “Cherokee.” However, it is quite possible that he never represented that it was Cherokee that would be investing. Rossi simply assumed it.
This would be an example of what goes around comes around. Rossi has often set up situations were he would say something that was interpreted in one way, but where he could later point out that the reality was different and he had not actually lied and the errors were made by others. He’s attempting to do this with the Johnson Matthey issue, which is not going to fly, because there are so many evidences and comments from Rossi, and the Bass emails nail it. Bass believed that JM was involved, and where did he get that idea from? He only dealt with Rossi, outside of a few conversations with IH people and investors (all heavily laced with instructed pretense).
However, definitely, Cherokee was not going to invest. Nevertheless, Darden is a principal at Cherokee and this fact would mean that Darden has access to massive investment resources, some of which might be tapped later, if necessary. So Darden being involved with Cherokee could be relevant to an ability of IH to voluntarily pay Rossi the full $100.5 million. Not as Cherokee being legally obligated, but as a matter of business connections. Darden may have made some assurances to Rossi based on that concept, and Rossi remembered it as if it were a promise on behalf of Cherokee, and that’s what he told Annesser. “The snakes lied to me!”
What Rossi believed, if he is telling the truth on that, was legally preposterous. If Cherokee was the sole owner of IH, with effectively full control, then Cherokee could become responsible for the debts of IH, I think. But this was not the case, ever.
IH owns IPH and thus the distinction between them is not crisp. Why was IPH set up? Some have suggested tax motives, and that seems possible to me. There is nothing wrong with this, and this was especially in order if other IP was being purchased or developed. LLCs are pass-through organizations, as I recall, and their profit is taxable to the owners, but, by the same token, their losses will reduce the income of the owners, so they are a kind of tax shelter. If the losses are real, those deductions are clearly allowable and not tax evasion. One way to look at this would be that if investment in LENR is actually a charitable donation, it becomes fully deductible, and immediately as soon as the losses are booked (that tax year). I’m sure that Darden et al would thoroughly understand all this and much more.
By selling the IP to IPH, a large deduction was taken as a loss, based on some estimate of actual value, probably. The $10 million investment was mostly expensed, I’d think, but I am not at all sure.
Well, that headline is perhaps a bit dramatic. But, I’ll confess, I was shocked by seeing the following from someone whom I had treated as a friend, long into the past (back in my Wikipedia days), and with whom I had positive correspondence.
I had been considering writing a post about a Lewan blog entry that was mentioned in a comment here.
Rossi’s engineer: ‘I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe’ (November 25, 2015)
After an interesting interview, which reveals that Fabiani clearly believes that Rossi’s work is real — and that he has seen amazing things — Lewan gives this:
Since mid-February 2015, Rossi and his US industrial partner Industrial Heat are running a one-year commercial trial on a customer’s site with a heat plant producing 1 MW. The plant is made up of four 250kW modules, each based on E-Cat technology. Unless something unexpected happens, the trial, which is controlled by a major independent third party certification institute, should be concluded by February or March 2016, and the results should then be presented.
In the comments, Lewan explains a bit:
November 25, 2015 at 11:25
@Slad
Everyone I have talked to confirm that a major independent third party certification institute is involved in the control of the 1-year test and that this institute will also be able to confirm the results when they are presented. I have no further proof though.
Mats does not tell us — at all — who “everyone I have talked to” is, but we know he talked with Fabiani, who would know of the involvement of a “major independent third party certification institute,” and we know he talked to Levi, who might have known of such. And did he talk with Rossi?
Since there was no such institute involved, only Penon, we know that Lewan relied on unreliable sources. He does acknowledge having no “further proof,” but that’s weak. It implies that the evidence for what he wrote was strong. That’s not the only problem.
IH allowed the installation, but as a sale of power, and only secondarily as a trial, with the idea that if Rossi clearly demonstrated to IH that there was substantial power generated, they might voluntarily pay him $89 million on that basis. The Doral demonstration was not the “Guaranteed Performance Test” of the IH-Rossi-Ampenergo Agreement, because Ampenergo explicitly refused to sign the Second Amendment allowing the GPT to be postponed. Rossi covered up this fact in his Complaint, though it was obvious from the start that the Ampenergo signature was missing. The Rossi attempts, in his pleadings, to convert some kind of vague consent to a test into the specifics of a GPT, even though there were obvious elements of a GPT missing; and not only signatures, but matters of substance, such as the ability of IH to actually observe the “test” in detail. Rossi excluded IH experts, twice (in July and in December).
The whole thing stunk, from lies about the customer at the start, to what appears now to be a hastily-invented “heat exchanger” that nobody saw, and that would have been very visible. Yet Mats is still stuck in his glorious past, where he was the world’s foremost confidant of Andrea Rossi. He wonders about conflict of interest, but has a huge one, a subtle one. When people criticize Rossi, or threaten his interests and plan in some way, he cuts them off, and he had done this over and over, and Mats knows this behavior. If any of the Lugano team had questioned what Levi and Rossi were doing (and Rossi was apparently there the whole time, and the Swedish team, not, not what the Lugano Report implied), they’d have been history.
Mats has never cleaned up that mess. Believe me, if I find a major error here, even years later, I will at least annotate it. That is what a responsible journalist will do, if he or she can.
So then we have this sequence on E-Cat World:
Critique of the Smith Report from the JONP
Mats Lewan • Sunday, April 9, 2017 9:54 AM [post time extracted from HTML]
I think there’s a list of advisors to IH somewhere. Anyone remember where it is?
Andreas Moraitis Mats Lewan • a day ago
214-23, p. 7.
That is here. It was actually a list of potential places for investment, and then included a list of advisors. None of this was a description of actual payments. Jed Rothwell is on the list of advisors, and has continually maintained that he has received no payments from IH, but this was used to, once again, accuse him of being paid by IH. He is known to have visited them in North Carolina, and that was then misinterpreted to indicate that he had visited the Plant in Florida (which he has always denied, and which would then make a certain IH response to interrogatories into perjury — unless Rossi arranged the visit, which seems a tad unlikely, given that Rossi excluded Rothwell from visiting him in Italy years before — and in spite of that, behind the scenes, Rothwell was a supporter of Rossi, arguing that people he trusted had seen the technology and it was real). Rothwell later reassessed that opinion, apparently after seeing data from Penon, which had all the obvious defects that have become public now, with the court filings.
Lewan is clearly not using the Rossi v. Darden resources here. They may be searched. The core page is the Docket page. Yes, it’s a huge amount of information. So resources are being created for analysis. That takes time. We just had a huge amount of data dumped on us. Much of it is redundant, but then, much is not.
The best organization is probably found in the Motions for Summary Judgment, where each party puts its best and strongest case forward. I was going to start with an analysis of the Rossi MSJ, but the exhibit references were such a mess (almost all incorrect), and it depended so strongly on a legal claim that has failed, the attempt to exclude all IPH claims based on an allegedly defective corporate deposition, that my opinion became that making it the core of a study would be a waste of time, so I started with RvD: Study of 203:IH Motion for Summary Judgment
This document also includes all the support paragraphs from DE 207. This is the case as it appears from the IH Motion. Anyone who actually wants to understand Rossi v. Darden would do well to study this. But it’s huge, still. I will be going through it, point by point and the first analysis will be looking for what is clearly established as fact, and what is not, what might remain legitimately controversial. At first impression, some of the IH claims are that, not as clear as required for Summary Judgment, they might require determination of fact by a fact-finder, i.e., a jury. However, there are many layers to this IH strategy, and the strongest aspects are likely to blow the Rossi case out of the water, leaving only the counterclaims active. At that point, settlement becomes far more likely.
Now, to come to what astounded me, though I’d certainly seen signs a year ago, that Mats was falling for a conspiracy theory, in spite of his warning to Sifferkoll.
Mats Lewan • a day ago
Anyone knows what the rules are for presenting evidence that hasn’t been brought up earlier, when the case goes up in court in June?
Josh G Mats Lewan • a day ago
Go ask Abd. Double dare you. (-;
Mats Lewan Josh G • a day ago
BTW do we know if Abd works for IH or not?
Once upon a time, Mats was a reporter and would have asked me that question directly. Now he asks with a “we” that is a narrow group of people. IH would obviously know if I work for them, and so would I, so, for starters, I’d be excluded from “we” or the question would be meaningless. This question was brought up many times, and Rossi himself accused me of being a paid puppet.
At one time, Mats was officially staff at LENR Forum. That disappeared. This blog is open for anyone to comment, and author privileges will be granted to real people, and Mats is real. Even if a bit deluded. This went on.
Josh G Mats Lewan • a day ago
Not sure but I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence to support it other than his quixotic behavior on IH’s behalf. But I stopped following things for quite awhile until the mid-March filings. So not sure.
SG Mats Lewan • 19 hours ago
I think he claimed that he has been paid to blog by somebody, but not IH.
I am attempting to respond there, the editor keeps locking up. But this would be it:
I suppose I should correct this. I have not been “paid to blog” by anybody. I was collecting documents and putting them in the filespace for the newvortex list, and an attorney, not connected with IH at all, offered to pay my PACER expenses. I have received a total of $50 so far, I may ask for more, and another person, also not connected with IH other than being long-term interested in LENR, has offered additional support, enough that I will probably be able to go to Miami to cover the trial if it happens. Enough to cover my travel, I may still need more to cover details like hotel.
I later started the blog when I was temporarily banned on LENR Forum, and then got serious about it when the newvortex archive became unusable (a yahoogroup problem) and LF banned me “permanently.” (Fun question: for what?)
One of the functions of the blog is to build analytical resources, as distinct from endless debate that goes nowhere, i.e., Blog Normal. This is intended long-term for general cold fusion issues, but is currently being used for Rossi v. Darden.
Mats would be most welcome as a participant, but he lost his status as a neutral analyst some time ago. He could recover, if he chooses to. It would take some work, and his excuse has been that he is too busy. It would be fun to guide him through the maze of documents in the case. One step at a time, which is rarely done. Mostly people start with conclusions (on more than one side — I hope that readers realize there are more than two “sides” here).
As to Mats’ question, others have answered reasonably, but not necessarily addressing the point clearly, and Mats himself summarizes it incorrectly:
Mats Lewan GiveADogABone • a day ago
In fact, I don’t interpret it as a blanket ban. Rather that most of the evidence is presented during discovery. But it doesn’t exclude some evidence to be presented in court, as long as it doesn’t contradict earlier depositions or testimonials, I guess.
It’s somewhat shocking that Mats will guess, but he declared previously that he did not have time to do actual research, the kind expected for a journalist.
The reality is that witnesses will be on the stand, and either side may ask them questions, and they may answer outside of what they said before. However, if what they say is new, an attorney may object. To introduce new evidence will require the permission of the Judge. It is not exactly a “blanket ban,” but failure to disclose evidence to the other parties can result in sanctions, all the way up to total dismissal of a party’s case.
“Contradiction” is not a characteristic of evidence, but of the assessment of evidence. Evidence could not be excluded based on contradiction. Rather, if there is contradiction in admissible evidence, there can be a question for a jury to resolve.
However, what may not be realized here is that the Motions for Summary Judgment do not necessarily disclose all the evidence. Rather, there is a huge volume of evidence — truly enormous — that was disclosed in discovery. As long as it was disclosed, it may be introduced at trial. What is disclosed in discovery is generally attested under penalty of perjury.
IH has adduced enough evidence, my present opinion — remember, I am in process of studying the materials — to obtain summary judgment on the core claim of Rossi, breach of contract re the $89 million, and if that claim is gone, so is the rest of his lawsuit. Because, then, there would be no trial on that claim, we can expect Rossi to go all-out in his Reply. We do have that Reply at this point, but I have not studied it. I will, comparing each point with the evidence we have.
Drama ensued. See the comments below. Someone apparently spoofed Mats Lewan, using his name and, most importantly, his real email address, so that the avatar displayed would be picked up from Gravatar, which we have enabled. The second post of this user started out more or less innocuously, but then the user edited it to add a gross sexual reference. Mats complained on LENR Forum, which is a bit odd, since I’m banned there and don’t necessarily see everything. However, THHuxleynew pointed out that post here. There are some aspects of possible interest in what ensued.
On LENR Forum, Mats Lewan wrote (creating a new topic)
ALERT:
Abd ulRahman Lomax yesterday posted a blog post at http://coldfusioncommunity.net…ndo-in-cloud-cuckoo-land/ commenting some of my actions and reports.
Under the blogpost there are comments made by Mats Lewan.
These comments are NOT made by me.
They are false and fraudulent, made up in short, and if Abd ulRahman Lomax reads this, I expect him to delete those comments immediately.
Apparently I read the second remark before it was edited to add the truly offensive remark. The rest of the material in those posts matched, at least to a degree, what Mats had posted elsewhere. Impersonation is still a major public offense, not to be tolerated. I might have some view that I might express in one context, but may not want to express it in other contexts, and that should be my right. But trolls may disagree.
Mats – perhaps you could post this on Abd’s site. It will immediately let you do this – I think. Then he would certainly get it, and also he could check IP etc… Furthermore the correction gets seen faster than if you wait for Abd.
THH was completely correct. Mats’ response was relatively unskillful. The basic harm — someone thinking that was him — could be most quickly addressed by Mats himself posting a comment exposing the impersonation, and confirming this by email from his known email address. Because Mats has not posted, his first comment would need to be approved, though it might be approved simply by using that same email address. (It was on his personal domain, and he obviously uses it wherever the gravatar shows up.)
Posting on LENR forum then drew more attention, exactly what trolls often want, and the obscene comment was then repeated there, and obviously was read by moderators who didn’t care.
Alan Smith wrote:
THHuxleynew wrote:
Mats – perhaps you could post this on Abd’s site.
I don’t expect that to happen in a hurry.
Classic Alan Smith, useless snark. Why not? I used to have direct email communication with Mats. Has Mats fallen into a Krivit hole? I will agree in one way, it is odd that Mats did not communicate directly with me. Maybe the fumes on Planet Rossi finally created too much mind-rot. It would also have been somewhat effective if Mats had responded to my comment on E-Cat World, in reply to his question there, since I get notification of responses.
Alan Smith wrote:
I don’t expect that to happen in a hurry.
I’ve done it for him. Though why he should not be able to do it himself is beyond me.
And indeed THH did post here, something actually useful. Alan Smith continues to emit smoke:
Able but unwilling I expect. I would be too.
Yes, Alan would be. Why? For the same reason that Alan Smith banned me from LF: he can’t stand my presence, he knows I can see what he does. So all this does come up:
Abd answered and leaked the IP of the fraudster
http://coldfusioncommunity.net…cuckoo-land/#comment-2382
[This link is a bit better, juicier. –Abd]
If there is disagreement with Abd, I estimate it is more about Doxxing/Transparency/Shaming vs Privacy than about tolerance to fraud.
Thanks, Alain. Zero tolerance here for fraudulent posting (which is not about disagreements, nor would it be about ordinary socking. Socking that impersonates another is generally illegal, and Mats had good reason to expect me to correct the situation. He wanted me to delete it. Because there were responses, I elected to not delete, but changed the user name to “(spoofed) Mats Lewan,” and used strike-out for the text, only actually deleting the obscenity. I think it is of interest that someone would spoof Lewan, and I think that it could be useful to find out who that would be.
And that is why I revealed the IP. I also have more data, obtained from the server logs. True administration at LENR Forum would very likely be able to identify the fraudster, at least with other accounts. However, what I found was that not only do moderators there not have access to IP information, neither do administrators; someone has server access, and that is probably Barty and the Owner. So if Barty wants to address this, he could. I’d happily correspond with him. I have also provided the information directly to Mats.
This is all standard stuff for WikiMedia Foundation administrators, and I was one. Privacy is respected, but the right to privacy is lost when one commits certain offenses. (Access to normally private IP information is confined to Checkusers and others with that level of privilege on WMF wikis, but any stand-alone blog owner, running on their own domain, has access to that information, it is in the raw server logs.)
THHuxleynew wrote:
I’ve done it for him. Though why he should not be able to do it himself is beyond me.
Abd wouldn’t be able to tell which user is the real one. Mats here has been verified.
Oh, I was able to tell. I already had been suspicious about the IP, but Lewan accessing the internet from student housing wasn’t impossible, so I didn’t reject the post on that basis. Yes. The LF Lewan account is long-standing, thus verified, which I immediately knew; however, at the first plausible allegation of spoofing, I’d have quarantined that post so that it could do no harm, pending resolution. I also have had direct email communication with Lewan, and verification would be trivial.
There is no rush, but perhaps, out of this, Lewan will start to help clean up the mess that he helped to create. I’d be happy to assist. One easy step at a time.
Peter Gluck posts links to his blog in many places, and I saw this yesterday. I’m mentioned (the day before). Speak of the Master of Hot Places….
EGO OUT, April 6, 2017
A year of litigation- the scales of Justitia have great loads of stuff- facts and assumptions. Facts have weight the assumption not- just now a selection/separation process takes place. 4-5 months and we will have the Verdict.
Indeed. However, we might have some verdicts, at least, within roughly a month, how long I expect it will take to handle the three pending Motions for Summary Judgment.
For the time given, the IH party is making huge efforts to kill the Penon ERV Report.
Actually, this is Peter’s myopic version of what is happening. Continue reading “How is the weather on Planet Rossi?”
I’ve been seeing spots of interest — and bubbles of mishe-gas — on LENR Forum and missing the hot format of immediate comment, even though, long-term, what I’m settling into here is much more useful.
I started using hypothes.is for commentary because Steve Krivit filed a copyright violation notice on a copy of a page of his here. It’s an interesting tool.
I will create tools here to link to my hypothes.is comments (or others if contributors take it up), and here are some to start. (If you don’t see annotations after following a link, look for a small “>>” link at the top right. That should open up annotations.)
Look down the page as linked through hypothesis.is. The page should show highlights on text on which there is public comment. With a hypothes.is account one may create comments or reply to existing ones. It’s a browser extension allowing one-click setup of annotation of any web page.
The links below are actually all the same, they point, through hypothes.is to the same LF page.
response to Zeus46.
response to joshg
response to IH Fanboy
comment on Paradigmnoia just giving a link
And more.
and then The next Rossi v Darden page.
Comments may be made here, or, with a hypothes.is account, comment replies can be entered with the annotations.
More annotation:
Playground 58
Playground 59
Playground 60
More Rossi v Darden threads on LENR Forum
Rossi vs. Darden developments 143
Rossi vs. Darden developments 144
Rossi vs. Darden developments 145
Rossi vs. Darden developments 146
Rossi vs. Darden developments 147
Still not caught up. When I do, I may add information to the above, if I find some annotation worth calling attention to. Anyone may also do that in comments below. Or, hey, you could annotate our pages.
My annotations may also be edited or deleted, comments here, or as replies to annotations, may include suggestions. Be nice, and you will be respected.
Looking at the above links today, there are problems. There are now “orphan” annotations. In at least one case, it appears that LF admin may have deleted a post, which then causes all subsequent paginations to be off. The post number appears to shift, but I’m not sure of that yet. LF is a moving target. So hypothes.is may not work reliably. There are also, it appears, hypothesis.is bugs. A URL with “no follow” in it was generated for an LF page, and the URL was badly formed, with an extra quote mark. I’ll be looking at this.
I attempted to annotate this post by THH. I can load this in my browser, which has the hypothes.is extension enabled, and I can see my annotations. However, hypothes.is generates this URL for the page:
This, as would be expected, loads the root page for that thread, and then my annotations are shown as orphans, with no reference.
If I, instead, generate the link for a specific annotation, say the first on that post, I get
I get the annotation, all right, but orphaned, and the original page is not displayed, rather the root.
If I go to the original page,
https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/4745-rossi-vs-darden-developments-part-2/?pageNo=159
I get a message that “there are no annotations in this group.” However, if I follow the link to the post, I can then see them. There are two annotations shown as orphaned. I recognizer the original post for one. It was not on that page, it was on one of the pages listed above. I think. This was the annotated text: “This notion that opinions are somehow magically equal or that any notion you dream up is somehow valid because it is your opinion is new-age nonsense”
This page has records from the hypothes.is feed, for me:
http://jonudell.net/h/facet.html?facet=user&search=Abd
This was the post:
Hey, I’m the New Age, my first teacher actually wrote a book, “This is the New Age, In Person,” and Jed Rothwell is sometimes a beknighted curmudgeon. However, he is also an expert on all things LENR, world-class, even though he is “only” a writer and LENR librarian. Librarians learn a lot.
The real New Age isn’t each and every stupid idea. It’s humanity waking up.
The quoted material at the top is from Jed Rothwell. With some effort — google doesn’t find it, so I manually went through Jed’s contributions, I found the post: https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/4745-rossi-vs-darden-developments-part-2/?postID=53407#post53407
With that URL loaded, the comment shows. But the comment actually is on a quotation of Jed: https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/4745-rossi-vs-darden-developments-part-2/?postID=53413#post53413
The way that LF handles paging and links apparently breaks hypothes.is. I’m sure LF staff will be crushed, absolutely crushed, to realize this. The annotation returns a direct link of https://hyp.is/V8qVJBNQEeeNLe9YiXMQdw/www.lenr-forum.com/forum/thread/4745-rossi-vs-darden-developments-part-2/
which returns the annotation, with text in strike-out, since it isn’t on the loaded page, which is page 1 of that thread. I’m going to see if there is a workaround here. Meanwhile, back to the drawing board and some real work. Darn. I thought I could just add snarky comments to my heart’s content. Maybe my heart doesn’t like snark. Wouldn’t surprise me.
This is related to what is happening, perhaps. My guess is that the pages changed enough to break the annotation links for some annotations. Something else is going on with the inability to properly link to annotations that are still connected with the necessary page load. The problem is difficult, and there is apparently a current effort to support previous page versions, where orphans are caused by page changes.
An obvious cause of page change on LF could be post deletions, which would be enough to break some remaining annotations because the page number would change and also the post number (which is calculated at display time, it is not fixed) — the site-wide post number is constant, but the number of a post within a thread is recalculated based on all undeleted posts.
Some user or mod edits might also affect some annotation anchors.
Posts deleted by the author remain in the LF thread with a small-text note. Ordinary moderator deletions also remain, but some mods elect to totally delete, which then changes pagination and post thread number, and I previously saw that LF staff didn’t care about breaking incoming links (and took steps to break them, deliberately, which effort was abandoned when a workaround was created here).
Too often. If we have a firm position, and we are faced with a massive body of data, and the data dumped into Rossi v. Darden was massive, we will scan over it looking for “facts of interest.” If we are not careful, and some are not at all careful, we will pick facts that appear to confirm our prior views. It’s called “confirmation bias.”
I’ve pointed out an example in How Planet Rossi reads fact. Here is another from the same user, same deposition.
Remember the mis-matched water meter serial number FUD that was pushed on all of us here? As if this was proof of fraud?
All just one big mistake by Murray. 215-03, pages 263-264.
This was classic. I’ve called it trolling, based on the actual meaning of “trolling.” Even though I do think IHFB is “sincere.” Nevertheless, he makes statements that are evidence free, or that don’t actually match the evidence, if it is cited. Naturally, IHFB doesn’t link to the document and this is a huge PDF file, but at least it is there. However, IHFB is actually comparing two alleged facts. One is what is in the deposition and the other is what was “pushed on all of us here”? That is largely meaningless without any actual citation or quotation, but trolls are not interested in evidenced and sober discussion, and IHFB expects to be attacked.
What happened? Continue reading “We see what we want to see”
