Sterling thinking from Planet Rossi

More like Pyrite. Actually, that’s an insult to pyrite, which makes beautiful crystals.

On LENR Forum, IH Fanboy wrote:

interested observer wrote:

A fine example of exuberant extrapolation that is the sole content of so many believers’ arguments.

In 2012, Blackrock made a comment that they were keeping an eye on startups in various fields including LENR. From that one-time remark, the conclusion is drawn that the fossil fuel industry is focused on LENR.

I guess if you have nowhere to stand, all you can do is execute an endless series of leaps of faith.

Yep, they were watching it then, and they are now. Just take a look at Siffer’s website logs that he posts on occasion. When the Lugano report was posted, it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times within a matter of days. There is a giant lurker community that spans the world, and they aren’t all hobbyists.

Interest in LENR is found in many communities. Even dedicated skeptics might download a report like Lugano, and this says nothing about “fossil fuel industry,” and that IHFB thinks it does indicates how he thinks. “interested observer” was pointing out the obvious obvious, and IHFB simply confirms it.

joshg wrote:

See here for one of many examples: http://www.sifferkoll.se/siffe…g-attention-to-the-e-cat/

“While looking in the logs after publishing the E-Cat report I found out that within minutes it was downloaded by an IP number owned by Blackrock.”

This is brilliant. Sifferkoll’s headline, 2014-10-09:

The Big Banks are Certainly Paying Attention to the E-Cat

And then Sifferkoll has “Within minutes after that oil futures started to fall and have stayed volatile since…”

Blackrock is a very large investment management firm ($5.4 trillion), not actually a bank. It has 13,000 employees. So … the IP evidence, if correct (and I have no reason to doubt it), indicates any one of a number of possibilities:

  1. Someone at Blackrock set up a search program, looking for articles releveant to LENR, based on keywords, and that program downloaded the report.
  2. Someone at Blackrock, one of 13,000 employees, had a personal interest.
  3. There is someone tasked by Blackrock with following LENR, or a series of technologies.

None of this makes it clear that “big banks” or the “fossil fuel industry” have a special focus on LENR, and it doesn’t even mean that any individual working for a big bank has a special interest, the download could have been idle curiosity — or some personal interest, not related to employment.

Indeed, the Sifferkoll blog post confirms the style of thinking, extrapolating from the thinnest of evidence, almost no evidence at all, to a dramatic conclusion that confirms the thinking of the analyst.

Sifferkoll shows a chart of oil futures, with a fall after the report was issued. The date is not shown and from the IP evidence, Sifferkoll must be referring to his hosting of the file, probably not the actual release. So someone may have been following his blog (and oil futures are his thing). Big surprise, someone at an investment firm invested in energy follows a blog on the topic?

10/7/2014 Sifferkoll announces that soon we will be able to read the “second independent third party report” (i.e., Lugano). The next day, Sifferkoll puts up the file, because arXiv rejected it.

From the timing of the download he labels “Report downloaded by Blackrock,” I vote for someone following his blog. They would get email notification of his posts. But it’s not “Blackrock,” it is someone likely working there, which may or may not represent a corporate interest.

His chart shows oil futures dropping from 88.20 to about 87.20. The currency is not stated (probably USD) and the time duration of the futures are not stated (and I don’t know how this is handled in those charts, since actual futures contracts may vary greatly).

However, that drop was actually tiny, compared to what was coming. The chart I found shows a drop around the beginning of 2015 to about 40. Now, futures reflect expected demand for oil at some point in the reasonably near future (though some, apparently, can be for as much as nine years ahead). What effect has Lugano had on demand for oil?

And suppose that Blackrock went into a “sell” position, betting that oil would go down. It is obvious that large forces were operating, and betting that oil prices would go down would have been a successful strategy at that point. Did it come from the Lugano report? Futures markets represent the thinking of thousands of people. How many of them would be aware of Lugano? — a report which is now widely discredited even among many who initially accepted it.

And this all fits into Sifferkolls conspiracy theory, that there are large forces operating to suppress LENR (such as those evil conspirators who are invested in solar power) — when those actually involved with LENR, for the most part — exceptions are rare — do not report any signs of this. There is just the normal skepticism, long-continued, and gradually fading as evidence becomes stronger.

Rossi’s claims never convinced skeptics, objections were far too obvious. Some people who knew that LENR is real — as a “laboratory curiosity” — may have been more friendly — a few –, but, among CMNS researchers, that interest has almost entirely vanished and has been replaced by a practice of ignoring Rossi.

Author: Abd ulRahman Lomax

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

2 thoughts on “Sterling thinking from Planet Rossi”

  1. Back in late 2011, when Rossi made a big show of running LENR producing 500kW whilst having a 500kW Diesel generator running it, it seemed too outrageous that anyone would claim such a result without having good data from trial runs. At the time the demo wasn’t good enough, but I was interested and spent around 3 months reading Jed’s site and became convinced that LENR itself was a real effect even though achieving the right conditions was *somewhat tricky*. From looking at Piantelli’s results, and what Rossi claimed to actually use, the power output of around 2W/m² of surface area also seemed like it might indeed be possible.

    Of course, the succession of other Rossi claims since then where each “confirmed” device was discarded and a new design was promoted, with fairly obvious errors in measurement protocols and some subtle ones too, but nothing where we could really say that it was definitively wrong or correct, has kept the game going until now. With a nod to Pweet here, I’ll need to clarify my dual standard on certainties: from a pure scientific standpoint we still can’t be certain that Rossi never saw any real transmutation or excess heat, since the measurements have never been good enough. From an engineer’s standpoint, though, where we deal with the practicalities of things that function as-designed or don’t, I’m certain that Rossi has nothing worth replicating since whatever results he had were very minor. Since I tend to focus on practical realisations of theories, in the last 5 years or so I haven’t bothered following what RossiSays except when I was poked. Doral, though, was a step too far for Rossi since it proves he was lying – 1MW leaves a big trail behind it. If he’d run a 1kW system there, though, we still couldn’t have been scientifically certain about the claims.

    Oil futures, though, are affected by political uncertainties and policies, as well as technical advances in extraction. I haven’t looked at the dates of the variations in oil futures and tied them to the technical advance of using CO2 injected into an old well, which increases both extraction-rate and the size of the extractable resource by a large amount. Those old, pumped-out wells have suddenly become valuable again and the “known resources” have been bumped up by 50% or so. That’s bound to affect the oil futures. A new pipeline from the Canadian tar-sands will also make that resource a lot cheaper (and safer) to get to the refineries and that resource is massive, especially if nuclear power is used to extract it (another fairly-recent technology). Those tar-sands need a lot of heat to get the stuff out, so it’s a continuous process which needs a market that absorbs the whole production. These sorts of things are far more likely to affect oil-futures than some Rossi claims that can’t be proven. Sifferkoll’s claimed correlations with Rossi announcements are thus likely to be coincidences, and he’s not looking at the whole picture. The USA has the capability to produce all the oil it requires and to export a load too – that’s a political decision. If the cost of importing goes high-enough, then there are also ways of converting any Carbon-based feedstock to liquid fuel, and think of all those coal-mines that are under threat in the USA, and the political gains of finding a use for their output.

    There have been a few people trying to shut down LENR research (such as Parks) but I think that is based on faith that what we know about nuclear theory is the last word, and that thus LENR research is wasted money – it’ll never work so there’s no point in allocating resources to it. Most physicists I’ve talked to rate LENR at much the same level as N-rays, magnet motors, or poltergeists, but have a more laissez-faire attitude to research in it (if they want to waste their time and money then go ahead). Since even the good research papers can (and have been) attacked on detail and, like all research, depends on the reader trusting that the data is well-collected and that all side-effects have been accounted for, we obviously need something really conclusive to convince the majority. That’s Plan B. Hopefully that will lead to a workable theory and thus better design of the experiments. If it is found that it only works with Palladium and that the Palladium is transmuted in the process, it may never be commercially-viable, but the new theories on nuclear processes may lead to something that is.

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