How are we doing?

As the first anniversary of this blog approaches, some statistics:

As of now, there are 247 published posts and  101 published pages. In terms of the number of comments, so far, the top posts, with 50 or more each:

One of the runners up:

There may be some effect, it appears, from snarky or fun headlines. From the dates, and knowing that I started the blog in November, 2016, it appears I have been learning to attract participation. Then I was distracted by some funny business on Wikipedia and Wikiversity, etc.

I looking at my domain statistics, I had thought that July, 2017, would be the peak for unique visitors, because I was the only reporter on the scene when Rossi v. Darden settled. No, July was 8422, but September was 8655.

The page with the most views is not surprising: Rossi v. Darden docket and case files.had 7288 views so far this year. The runner-up was the post on the RvD trial settling, with 5470 views.

There are several people with author privileges here, but only two have published posts, myself and THHuxley, and THH only a couple.

Fundraising for the Miami trip was very successful. Enough was donated to allow me to cover the full trial, but then it settled quickly! So there is funding for additional travel; I hope to go to Texas soon, and there will be ICCF-21 in Colorado. Thanks to everyone that makes this possible!

(and a little perspective. I have posted 2100 Answers on Quora.com, and have 3.2 million page views there so far. I have 1596 followers. I’m not writing much there, just sporadically, but Quora recently promoted an Answer I wrote — about traffic citations — to 17,000 people. At one point, one of my Answers — a fun piece of silliness — was promoted to a million people. Page views for my Answers are running about a million a year. Blogging is generally more fun, though.)

Author: Abd ulRahman Lomax

See http://coldfusioncommunity.net/biography-abd-ul-rahman-lomax/

12 thoughts on “How are we doing?”

  1. What is the monetary compensation that Mats Lewan is receiving for his assistance to Rossi? You’d think it would be substantial, but AR has proved to be very sly in getting people to do his bidding with only vague future benefits.

    1. As far as I know, Lewan is paid only for expenses (perhaps, if that), but he also gets access and can sell his books. It’s not much money, likely.

  2. Abd, I’d like your reaction to the latest ecatword silliness, also ,could you perhaps print some kind of a hint of someone, somewhere, extracting enough energy to heat a fly by these so called processes?

    1. I’ve been reading the LF reports from Alan Smith and others, on the Rossi QX demo. So far, there is not enough information to understand what is being shown and claimed. They had an oscilloscope there. What was it set up to show? Power input measurements were DC, but it appears there may have been AC power input. Lewan is aware that there is missing data. However, he clearly accepts that Rossi needs secrecy. There is no validation of technology with secrecy unless the testing is fully independent (which could be done). This is classic Rossi confusion, it’s been going on since before I started watching in 2011.

  3. “ordinary language” with energy is not the understanding of science.

    Conservation of energy is not an axiom except within certain confined considerations. I.e., we may analyze situations stating CoE as an assumption. What you are doing in looking to find a way around the 2LoT has long been attempted. So far, each idea or scheme has turned out to be based on false assumptions.

    Your own efforts appeared to be the same (which is why I emphasized studying existing devices, actual behavior at low levels, noise). Yes, there can be “biased fields,” but these are set up externally, thus there is external interaction. It is like your idea of perfect reflection with no recoil. It imagines a wall that is simply immobile, which requires external forces. It neglects interactions with the wall.

    I do encourage you to explore all this to your full personal satisfaction. While I consider it extremely unlikely that you will find some anomaly around this, it is not “impossible,” and “unlikely” is a heuristic, not a proof of anything.

    The exploration will be of value if it increases understanding.

  4. Abd – it must cheer you that where LF banned you, enough people value your work that you got real money to continue it. Getting the truth about Rossi (or actually disentangling what’s actually true from the lies) is valuable, since it affects our decisions on whether to buy a new gas boiler or wait until Rossi comes good. And wait….

    One thing that surprises me somewhat is the number of comments when you look at the number of visitors. It seems somewhere around 0.1% of the people who read the site actually put up their own thoughts or questions. Maybe it’s the more-cerebral attitude here rather than the short, snappy and emotional responses most sites seem to collect.

    1. Right. It is also quite noticeable that many comments here are long. It’s not just mine! LF is a “social” site. Wikipedia is also, in fact, social, in spite of the mission, and deprecated discussion and study. “original research.”

      Wikiversity was created for “educational resources,” which included “learning by doing,” and then, by extension, discussion, and the writing of essays, as might occur in a university seminar. In theory, Wikipedia articles, where an educational resource exists on Wikiversity, should link to it, as a place to actually discuss and learn about the topic, which would then create some level of feedback (what happens on too many Wikipedia articles is that the editors do not understand the sources, and report from their understanding and select sources that reflect their own misunderstandings).

      There are “sister wiki” templates for such links, and guidelines suggest it. The faction that came to dominate the cold fusion article — and many other “battleground” topics — always rejected these templates, giving completely bogus arguments (like “self-published,” completely missing the point. That would disallow links to other Wikipedia articles! Wikiversity has a neutrality policy, but handles it by inclusion, not exclusion.) I’d have handled that, but they managed to make it impossible for me to continue to operate there.

      That faction doesn’t care about education, only about their own propaganda.

      In any case, yes, it cheers me. So does the response of the general public to me on Quora. Quora does allow the presentation of many points of view. One needs to be careful, there is a draconian civility policy, there is very low tolerance, and popular writers especially need to be careful about trolls, who will attempt to get a writer to violate the policy, even if only in appearance. Quora Moderation reacts to appearances!

      It turns out that when people actually have questions, and real interest, they appreciate long responses, if those go deep and maintain focus on the question or what is related or behind it. Long responses in bar chatter would be rude! “Attempting to dominate the conversation!” One Quora, with a popular answer, better than 1% my press the upvote button. Many fewer comment. Originally, I had Quora set to notify me by email when someone upvoted. It became totally overwhelming, so I had to shut that off. That top post, about “could a billionaire swim in a swimming pool of vodka?” has, at this point, 810.4k Views, 11,388 Upvotes. I think there are not much more than 1% of the number of upvotes that comment. However, what happens on Quora is that when people like a writer, they follow him or her, and are then notified of Answers. So one can tell something about a writer by the number — and quality — of followers.

      With over 3 million page views, I have almost 1600 followers. To put that in some perspective, my favorite writer on Quora is Dushka Zapata. She has over 92 million answer views, and 138,000 followers. Sometimes I comment on her Answers, she always responds (and, yes, she follows me). There are many excellent writers (and many with intense life experience) on Quora, in addition to the usual drek. The structure, however, does encourage depth. One simply ignores all that crap!

      1. Abd – when all you want to do is to express disgust with some situation, a few words and maybe some emoticons will do the job. Similarly if you want to tell the world you’re happy about something. Knowing the emotional state of some stranger isn’t that interesting to me, though, so a lot of the blogs that have such comments are not attractive. Maybe read the lead article and leave the rest. More likely just avoid that blog altogether unless someone with a track record of intelligent comments points at it for a particular item.

        It is possible to get deeper information in a bar conversation. Of course, that won’t be a monologue but interspersed with questions or other points that need answering. I’ve had a few as both information giver and receiver. I no longer live within walking/staggering distance of a bar, though, so I’ve no recent experience. That leaves the net, where distance is no object and it’s easier to find like minds who want deeper discussions.

        You and THH have helped me by discussing the 2LoT stuff, and showed me where my explanations were insufficient. I haven’t changed your minds but it has changed my approach. I’m still getting the experimental proof sorted out (target end of this year), but the discussions gave me greater clarity. Obviously I’m not yet good-enough on the clarity for the explanation, but I’m not a natural teacher and for something like this it needs demonstrating and not simply discussions. The experience that heat only moves from hotter to colder is so basic and well-known that the logical postulate that it’s a random process, and thus that the temperature is immaterial at a molecular level, is *difficult* to accept.

        Longer discussions are needed to find precisely what is wrong in an idea. We need to be able to see the other’s point of view and be able to explain it. Then we can see the reason for the disagreement and either resolve it or find what else needs to be found out in order to decide which viewpoint is nearer to correct. Here, there is space for longer discussions and the expectation that people will follow your lead in putting some thought into what they say rather than just saying how they feel. That makes it much more worthwhile the time reading what is said.

        1. Don’t think that I’m claiming bar conversations are useless. Rather, they do not build educational or informative content for later use. Those who follow one of them may learn and develop understanding. Or not. That depends on many factors.

          “heat only moves from hotter to colder” is a statistical description of a bulk effect. It becomes meaningless on the molecular level, where the underlying behavior is simply conservation of energy. The bulk statistical effects fall out from this through analysis (and, of course, experimental confirmation, which can never establish “proof” of no exception.) Individual molecules do not “know” the bulk temperature. They only “know” — I.e., measurably react to — the local electronic fields of their naigbbors. Temperature is not exactly “immaterial” at the molecular level, because it will generally describe the local velocity distributions. However, the “local temperature” of some small region may be hotter or cooler than the bulk, and — rarely — much hotter or cooler. “Much hotter” is not hot enough to generate measurable fusion rates, for example, but”much cooler” might well create the low-relative-momentum conditions (“very low temperature”) needed for Bose-Einstein Condensate formation, hence the theoretical investigations of cold fusion in that direction.

          Your ideas were more directly 2nd Law violations. These are in a class of idea that appear to generate violations of conservation of energy, if applied to the bulk. Energy=work. If you can extract energy from a region without a “sink,” heating a region that is the same temperature or hotter, you can then create work. Many such ideas have been proposed, such as the quantum ratchet studied by Feynman. They have always, so far, turned out to be a product of naive and incomplete analysis. They exist in an ideal universe of imagination, where one can imagine any mechanism without needing to address physicality, such as the ratchet failure rate as it gets smaller and smaller.

          And thanks for the appreciation. People who are “wrong” but who civilly and cogently defend their ideas create educational content, when full discussion is allowed.

          1. Abd – the starting-point is the axiom that energy is conserved, and the puzzle being why normal language treats energy as being used or lost. There is a problem with language in that if you don’t have the right words then it’s hard to think the thought and, if you do, then it’s hard to convey that thought. The natural processes of randomisation of direction are what give rise to the loss of the unidirectional energy that we need to do useful work. However, the action of a force-field will produce non-random directions, too, and so we have a competition between the tendency to disorder and the tendency to order. In most experiments, the tendency towards disorder is stronger and the mathematics is in any case irrefutable, and we see entropy as increasing. I figure that getting the field-strength high-enough can however produce more order than disorder, and that it’s worth working on experimental tests of this. Your words on this, and Tom’s, have shown me the difficulty in explaining this basically-simple idea in words that will convince others, and that for something this outrageous I need to have solid experimental proof. For the moment, I’m working on that rather than on the explanation, but I will return to the write-up once I have some results that show the validity of the hypothesis. Given that there are already experiments that show this happening but at such a low level that they can be dismissed as experimental error and thus ignored, in order to be successful my results need to be undeniably large and to follow the predicted dependency on absolute temperature.

            Of all the people who must have read my writings on this subject, only you and Tom have engaged in discussion of the details. Most people simply dismiss it, which isn’t helpful in finding the faults in the logic or the explanation of it. I need to be able to resolve the problems in the explanations or alternatively to find a good reason from first principles as to why it is wrong so I can accept that it is not after all possible. Logic says that a strong-enough field will impose order, and I can devise practical experiments to show this – after all, apples always fall downwards from the trees and don’t go in random directions. Unless of course there’s a random wind….

            Since designing and making the physical devices really requires decades of experience in each of multiple disciplines, and I haven’t got that, discussions of specific points (such as Tom’s problem with creating a depletion-layer) help as well. It’s a short-cut to get expert help rather than searching the net in the hope of acquiring the right data. I now have the capability to put the right layers down, so from here it’s experimental measurements and finding out what doesn’t match the predictions, then finding how to fix it. Fairly soon we’ll find out if I’m competent enough in the design and manufacture to get such a result. It could be I’m simply wrong, after all, no matter how well I implement the design.

            I have to duck the question of “what is energy” since words are not sufficient. I can however describe what it does and the dance of energy from one place to another, and it’s notable that any averaging process will miss important details. To get a picture of what’s really happening we need to look at the detail of the interaction between force-fields and particles, and not at the sum of a lot of interactions until after we understand the individual interactions. What is random, and what isn’t random or not totally random? It’s those non-random biases that could be pretty important.

            When I have something more to show on this, I’ll put it in the “break the law” string so it’s in the right place. In the meantime, thanks for the discussions. They have helped.

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