Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:19, 18 January 2009

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Hello, Phil153, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Misplaced Pages:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! --Dr.K. (talk) 03:59, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

CF discussion

Hi Phil 153. I noticed you self-reverted a comment on the CF talk page about some of Jed Rothwell's claims. To whit, you wrote:

Jed, the study you linked does not support the claim that cold fusion boiled water. It suggests that boiling may have continued longer than it should have in an already boiling cell. As for the rest, I'm confused. You said:

No chemical reaction has ever been found in a successful cold fusion experiment., yet this article on Arata's demonstration clearly says: This generates heat, which Arata says is due to a chemical reaction, and the temperature of the sample, Tin (green line), rises to 61 °C. Are you saying that Arata's demonstration was not a successful cold fusion experiment? Phil153 (talk) 00:13, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Congrats on beginning to see Jed's tactics. He does this all the time. That's why I learned not to bother with him. He just wastes inordinate amounts of time.

I moved you comment here so that people could see what you found out. If this was spf, everyone would be yawning, because Jed did this for years there, but Misplaced Pages is new territory for him, so the word needs to get out. Hope you don't mind, if you do please delete this unceremoniously. Kirk shanahan (talk) 12:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

No worries, I reverted cause I didn't see the point in continuing and it wasn't helping the article.

As for Jed, I started off giving CF maybe a 5% chance of being real (there's a lot of smoke for no fire), and revised down with every cold fusion paper I read. Phil153 (talk) 13:51, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

In 1989 when CF was announced I wasn't 'in the field'. I and a lot of people I knew guessed that there was something going on, but not what F&P claimed because that was too far out. Unfortunately, the field polarized and cemented and they basically stopped looking for any other explanation of the effect. My thesis is that they are seeing real effects, just not nuclear ones. Basically, you have my mechanism for how to get apparent excess heat, and the rest is just various forms of contamination. 192.33.240.30 (talk) 14:05, 12 December 2008 (UTC) Oops, forgot to login Kirk shanahan (talk) 14:06, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

If you mean "they're faithfully recording what their instruments are telling them", then I'd agree in most cases. Phil153 (talk) 19:17, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

The Cry (film)

I have spent the last 90 minutes bringing the article up to code and feel I have shown definite notability since its DVD release of last May. Might you suggest anything else I might add? Thanks, Schmidt, 01:46, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure you're more familiar with this topic than I am. I commented on the AfD. I think any film with reasonable distribution is clear keep, but the guidelines disagree completely according to my reading. Misplaced Pages:Notability_(films)#General_principles. Perhaps the guidelines need to be reviewed? Phil153 (talk) 02:04, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

No problem. I have answered your concern at the AfD and have included those beefier sources in the article itself. I had almost given up in the first few minutes of my search because as a theatrical release it did not make much money nor was well received. But it was after discovering that it had a well received release on DVd last May that I was able to find a few quite nice reviews. So it now meets the guidelines. Thanks, Schmidt, 05:29, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

My response to your message at Cold Fusion talk

I uploaded this but it got deleted a few times. Perhaps a robot or person is erasing my comments there. They told me they would do this.

It is not important, but I thought you might want to see it.

. . . Ah. They have deleted the entire discussion. As Bob Dylan put it:

"Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good

They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would"

- Jed

Phil153 wrote:

I understand that you have a BA in Japanese. While commendable, I fail to see how this gives you expertise in either chemistry or physics.

Again I suggest that you read the papers and books I have written about cold fusion, and judge whether I understand the subject -- and whether I know my own limitations. I have edited over 200 papers in this field. Do you think the authors would trust me to do that if I accidentally changed their meaning or messed up the documents? Please, use your common sense and your judgment to evaluate my work.

As for the issues surrounding your site, your point on checking the sources doesn't really cut it. It is simply too time consuming to check every one against paper sources for evidence of changes.

As I said, you can easily establish that the authors trust LENR-CANR.org. They would not give me their papers or add links to the site in their papers and books otherwise. They always check my version for errors -- I tell them to.

Misplaced Pages points to millions of documents. You do not go around checking every one of them. Once it is established that a site has credibility, you assume that all documents there are legitimate. It is much easier for you to check the bona fides and establish credibility for LENR-CANR than for other sites, because every one of our documents lists the original source at the top.

Are you categorically denying having ever added a lead or other commentary to a source paper?

Oh for crying out loud! This is ridiculous. Read the document and see for yourself. It is here: lenr-canr.org PLUS /acrobat/ERABreportofth.pdf

As you see, I wrote a two-page introduction, in a different font, signed by me. No, I do not "categorically deny" writing something and signing it. The document begins:

"ERAB, Report of the Cold Fusion Panel to the Energy Research Advisory Board. 1989: Washington, DC.

A copy of the ERAB report has been prepared by the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) organization (www.ncas.org). It is available here in HTML format: http://www.ncas.org/erab/. It is converted to Acrobat format in this document, below.

This organization has not posted any other papers about cold fusion.

Cold fusion researchers consider the ERAB report highly prejudiced for many reasons. It was concluded in a rush long before there was time to perform and publish serious replications. . ."

The LENR-CANR index for the document says:

"A copy of the ERAB report has been prepared by the National Capital Area Skeptics (NCAS) organization (www.ncas.org). It is available here:

http://www.ncas.org/erab/

This library contains a brief introduction to the report and a copy of the NCAS version of the ERAB report."

We have similar short introductions to many other documents, listing -- for example -- where the document came from, who translated it, or noting that different versions have been published.

Now let us look at the statement by Guy:

"In one case I found that a purported link to a major paper started with an editorial by the site's "librarian", (JedRothwell), spinning the content . . ."

A purported link? You can click on the link and see in an instant whether this is a good copy or not. What is "purported" about that?

An editorial? I told the reader where the document came from, where to get the original, and what the researchers think of it. Is the reader so vulnerable and suggestible he cannot survive reading my introduction and still judge the ERAB document?

"In one case" Guy found a document with an introduction? He did not look very hard. There are dozens of others, as I said. In all cases the introduction is clearly marked and signed.

- Jed Rothwell, Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.89.102.50 (talk) 16:50, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

POSTSCRIPT. What was that you were telling me about how there is no oppression at Misplaced Pages? You must think it is okay for those people to shred my reputation, and publish nonsensical insinuations about how I secretly slid a two-page signed introduction into a document, hoping no one would notice my signature. I am not allowed to protest or set the record straight. If you see nothing unethical or even unreasonable about this, you and I have different standards.

Anyway, Misplaced Pages is a disgrace, as I said. Quoting Lore Sjöberg:

The Misplaced Pages philosophy can be summed up thusly: "Experts are scum." For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.

- Jed —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.89.102.50 (talk) 22:02, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Just in case Jed reads this - the above does not address the relevant copyright question. Having the permission of the authors is not sufficient (in fact, in many cases it is legally irrelevant.) For example, authors submitting to Elsevier journals are required to transfer their copyright to Elsevier. The legally relevant question is whether you have permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the papers that they own the copyright to. Do you have permission from, for example, Elsevier to publish their copyrighted material? --Noren (talk) 04:16, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Noren asked:

Do you have permission from, for example, Elsevier to publish their copyrighted material?

Yes, but only for a few papers. There are several outstanding cold fusion papers published by them which I do not have permission to reprint, so they are missing from the library. Publishers did not grant me permission to upload most of the recent papers by Szpak and Mosier-Boss, so I have only their older papers, conference papers, and public domain U.S. Navy publications. You can see a list of their papers here, and you can see that I cannot upload several of them, regrettably: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakSspawarsyst.pdf As you see, papers 15 through 21 are not uploaded. I am negotiating for one of them.

Most of the papers at LENR-CANR.org are from conference proceedings, rather than journals because there are fewer copyright restrictions. I would prefer to reprint the journal versions, which are often similar in content but better.

In some cases I have permission to reprint some number of selected pages, but not the whole document. See, for example: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHdevelopmen.pdf In some cases the publisher gives permission to upload a manuscript version, not the final version. See, for example: lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LiXZachinesevi.pdf I think this manuscript version was presented at conferences and before publication, but I do not know if it appeared in any conference proceedings.

- Jed —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.89.102.50 (talk) 14:51, 18 January 2009 (UTC)