User talk:JWSchmidt/Blog/29 January 2011

Commentary
(source of the following comments)
 * These events did not happen by magic, John. They took a lot of work by the community, and by me, in fact. You did not support that work, you hindered it, for the most part, and that's continuing, attacking those who actually were helping, holding on to old grudges. --Abd 19:01, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Abd, I look forward to your autobiography in which you describe how you became rich selling cold fusion devices and saved Wikiversity by trying to impose an indefinite block on my editing. Since you must be flush with cold fusion cash I want payment for all the hours I've spent defending Wikiversity against your "wiki common law"-motivated policy violations and trying to keep you and your fellow abusive sysops from blocking me (related reading, An example of how Abd saved Wikiversity). "You did not support that work" <-- What "work" are you talking about? --JWSchmidt 00:15, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * JWS, I see that you are holding a host of misconceptions.
 * I'm quite unlikely to get rich from cold fusion. That you say this shows that you've completely misunderstood what I'm doing. What I'm proposing to sell, after they are tested, are kits to replicate certain work done by the United States Naval Research Laboratory at San Diego (SPAWAR), and published under peer review in a number of mainstream journals. The kits will cost me about $50 per cell, and I'll sell them for about $100. I'll be lucky if I get much more than my investment back. Cold fusion is nowhere near ready for commercial applications, unless certain very recent reports from an Italian researcher/entrepreneur Rossi turn out to be other than fraud or some strange error, and I'm not placing any bets on that. That is, in fact, if it's real, probably low energy nuclear reactions, but of a completely different kind than I'm working with. Just so you know. My own cold fusion work is solidly mainstream, in fact, merely replicating mainstream work. You've fallen for a common impression; instead, the highly skeptical position disappeared from the peer-reviewed journals about five or six years back, and recent reviews are all positive. I'm even acknowledged in one, the most recent, mentioned in a journal that Einstein published in. I think that's really cool. I'm having fun, do you have a problem with that?
 * I did not attempt to indef block you, and that you remember it this way makes me really wonder about your memory. Elsewhere today I pointed to the discussion, as I have before, but you keep repeating this. It's true, I briefly supported a proposal to indef block, conditionally, only as a temporary measure in lieu of anything else, and then struck that. Somehow you've forgotten about the conditional part and the striking. You've forgotten that the others who supported indef did not make it temporary or conditional, they would have made it into a ban. Had I continued to support, it might have become that. You've forgotten that I opposed the harassment of Beetlebaum, that I helped recover deleted files for you, and, indeed, that I protested recusal failure on the part of Adambro, who had repeatedly used tools with respect to you.
 * Indeed, you have forgotten that I worked to re-integrate Moulton into the community, that had Ottava not unblocked him, it would probably have happened soon, that I attempted to rescue all acceptable content from Moulton even when he was blocked, to document and prove that he was actually doing more good than harm, putting a lot of work into that, and you have forgotten that I was the major force behind the unblock of Thekohser, setting up the process, with his cooperation, to make it clear that he was capable of cooperation if treated with respect, that he could make positive contributions, all without violating policy, but certainly being innovative: that was an example of how a banned user could make positive contributions without being disruptive through self-reversion. But I don't know that we even need this now, for who is banned who is a possible positive contributor? Is there any ban proposal active, other than the one filed against me? If you know of someone, let me know! As long as I have tools, I can directly help, though I can -- and did -- help without tools. Any user could help. You could have done far more. We could have done far more together. I remember asking you to review some Moulton contributions, because they concerned your interest, you didn't even look.
 * I've asked you to list actual policy violations, and I've not seen them. Mostly you have simply asserted that there was something wrong with my attitude, or my expression of "common law" -- which simply means "common practice," i.e., what experienced users expect to be normal.
 * From my point of view, your continual attack, based on your memories of 2008, has been doing damage, and I've told you that many times, and I think that's why you've opposed me so strongly. I urge you to rise above that, and to start to cooperate for the future of Wikiversity. I seriously doubt you will be blocked, you certainly won't be blocked by me, but you could, anyway, become irrelevant, as you mostly have been, the last two years. Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin.' --Abd 02:34, 30 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Abd, your bill for wasted time continues to grow. You list a number of things that you claim I've forgotten, but I have not forgotten them. Why do you invent fantasies and state them to be facts? "I remember asking you to review some Moulton contributions, because they concerned your interest, you didn't even look." <-- I'd be interested to know how you know what I looked at. I was being closely watched by some of your fellow abusive sysops and after I posted some of Moulton's comments to Wikiversity I was blocked from editing, which was your stated goal at the time. When I created a Community Review and used it to discuss getting Moulton unblocked you called for a speedy termination of that Community Review. Here, you spew, again, a wall of text to try to deny that you joined a policy-violating effort to indef block me. "I did not attempt to indef block you" <-- Right. Here is another of your walls of text where you criticized me for objecting to the horrors that the Wikipedia community has been subjected to and where you make rambling plans to silence my protests. What is your definition of incivility, anything you don't want to hear? Here you tried to get me blocked by pretending that my defense of Wikiversity was "disruptive". This is where you tried to indef block me. In all these cases I was acting to protect Wikiversity and you sided with those who have vastly disrupted Wikiversity. "I've asked you to list actual policy violations" <-- This past Summer I discussed some of your policy violations in a community review. You have repeatedly called for unjustified blocks and bans against Wikiversity community members, a serious violation of Wikiversity policy. "From my point of view, your continual attack, based on your memories of 2008, has been doing damage, and I've told you that many times, and I think that's why you've opposed me so strongly." <-- My complaints about your policy violations are the basis of my opposition to you having access to sysop tools, as I stated when you asked for tools and more recently since you abused your tools and imposed an absurdly bad block on Ottava. Stop fantasizing about there being some other reason. You can't be trusted to use sysop tools according to Wikiversity policy. "That you say this shows that you've completely misunderstood" <-- My only point was that you are as likely to become rich from cold fusion as it is that your abusive and policy-violating attempts to block and ban me have saved Wikiversity. I gladly thank you for anything you have done to help Wikiversity. However, that does not stop me from opposing your access to sysop tools. You've shown that you can't be trusted to use the tools in accordance with Wikiversity policy. --JWSchmidt 04:04, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You might get what you wish, I hope you enjoy it. I was watching Hanna Montana with my daughter and Hanna's father gave her some advice about not overextending herself, Hanna then told a caller that, sure, she'd go to that event... He then said, "When I talk to you, is what you hear wa wa wa wa wa wa wa?" Your response to the issue of my supposed attempt to indef you is exactly that. I see total denial, it's as if you can't read. Puzzling. Wall of text? Pot. Kettle. Black. --Abd 09:02, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * "Wall of text?" <-- I've learned that abusive sysops love to spew piles of false and misleading text in the hope of 1) distracting onlookers from their abuses and 2) provoking those who have been abused into responding in a way that will provoke more abuse. If the abused wiki community members fail to respond to the false and misleading statements of abusive sysops then that is used as "proof" that the false and misleading statements were true. Thus I feel compelled to try to read your fantastic distortions of reality and set the record straight. --JWSchmidt 14:48, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * News flash! Wikipedia doesn't do Due Process or Peer Review.  And if the flagship project doesn't do it, why should any WMF-sponsored project swim against the prevailing current? —Gastrin Bombesin 15:20, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

Signals of Note
Early in 1876, Elisha Gray came up with an idea of how to devise a variable resistance microphone that could be used to make a harmonic telegraph that could send undulating waves rather than conventional on-off clicks used in Morse Code. On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson successfully tested Elisha Gray's device, and the telephone was born.

Bell managed to send a voice-modulated signal over a telegraph line by means of a metal needle dipped into a cup of acidulated water. The needle was attached to a diaphragm, which vibrated with the sound of Bell's voice. As the needle bounced up and down, it varied the amount of surface area in contact with the conducting water. This demonstration proved that an audio frequency signal could be transmitted over a telegraph wire by means of a variable resistance.

The water microphone was not commercially practical, and was soon replaced by Thomas Edison's much more convenient carbon button microphone, which is still in use to this day.

There is another way to generate an audio frequency signal in a manner similar to the one conceived by Elisha Gray and demonstrated 135 years ago by Bell and Watson. The other way is to leave the electrode submersed in a conducting electrolyte and vary the amount of surface area exposed to the liquid by letting bubbles form and slough off the surface. The easiest way to do this is to use a Faradaic current that dissociates water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. As the gas bubbles form on the surface of the electrodes the varying resistance will operate much like the water transmitter of Gray, Bell, and Watson. Instead of transmitting undulating waves carrying a voice signal, it will just be a noise signal that will sound like crackling, popping, or frying bacon.

This is what occurs in Cold Fusion cells, when they are bubbling furiously from high levels of Faradaic current. For extra credit (and a shot at the Nobel Prize), can you work out a technical model for the amount of signal power in variable resistance microphones of either design?

Moulton 03:41, 30 January 2011 (UTC)


 * I wonder if it would be possible to create an electrolysis cell where it is easy to change the amount of gas adhering to the electrodes and show that doing so changes the "excess heat" in a way that can be shown to be due to fluctuations in power delivered to the cell. I'm imagining a demonstration cell that visitors could control at a museum of science. It might be a good learning tool for understanding how scientists and engineers can fool themselves when they fail to take into account all of the variables in an experiment. --JWSchmidt 04:10, 30 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's not only possible, it's been done. You might recall previously discussing this chart from Michael McKubre's work.  —Moulton 04:33, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You are misleading him, Barry. If what you proposed, JWS, could be done easily, it would have been done twenty years ago, when, it's said, about half the discretionary National Science Foundation funding was being spent to attempt to replicate CF. Barry has come up with two plausible-seeming artifacts that are at total variance with the actual experimental data. Input power has been measured, not just with the average voltage times set constant current method McKubre used in the report Barry is referring to, but with power meters, with high-speed data acquisition, and with actual calorimetry in "dead cells," of three kinds: light water cells and heavy water cells with either platinum cathodes or palladium cathodes which, for reasons which took a decade to figure out, no excess heat was found. All the methods agree on the input power. The same cathode, in the experimental series that Barry points to, showed, after being fully loaded, no excess heat in two current excursions just like the one in the third excursion that shows the clear excess heat. Same bubbling. In the dead cells and the hydrogen controls, calorimetry stays flat at zero excess heat. Barry is blowing smoke.


 * For the status of cold fusion now, which is quite different from a decade ago, see Naturwissenschaften review. There is a preprint at . Conclusion: fusion. Just not d-d fusion, almost certainly. It's quite what Pons and Fleischmann claimed in 1989, it was forgotten that their published claim was not fusion, but "unknown nuclear reaction." The mechanism is still unknown, but from the ash, and the value of the heat compared to the ash, we now know that the reaction takes in deuterium as fuel and produces helium as product. And no gamma rays are emitted. That conclusion is based on the work of a dozen research groups around the world, and there is no contrary experimental evidence. It's a replicable and replicated finding. Some of the early negative replicators also measured helium. They found no excess heat and they found no helium. Which confirms correlation.


 * Now if Barry can figure out how bubbling causing power supply noise causing an appearance of excess heat, in spite of all the clear evidence that the calorimetry is accurate, can also explain the presence of helium, at levels correlated with the excess heat, and which rise above ambient when enough heat has been generated, he's really got something and he should definitely write it up and get it published, so that hundreds of researchers around the world, governments, etc., can stop wasting money on this fantasy. Eh?


 * Our own Cold fusion/Recent sources page shows 19 positive reviews of cold fusion published since 2005, in mainstream journals and academic publications listed by Dieter Britz, a skeptical electrochemist. There are no negative reviews in that period, outside of the popular press. Perhaps the mainstream journals are telling us something? Or should we believe Barry, with his confident assertions of bogosity and the delusion of others? --Abd 08:57, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Frachtwaggons von Kauderwelsch. —Montana Mouse 14:19, 30 January 2011 (UTC)