Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 02:02, 1 February 2009

Because my Talk page is semiprotected, due to vandalism by an IP editor, I have created this page so that IP editors and newly registered editors may leave messages that would otherwise be left on my Talk page. If replying to something there, please leave sufficient information so that I may place your message in context. Messages here will be routinely deleted, and deletion does not signify that I have read the messages yet, I will recover them from page History. Clear vandalism here will be reverted without comment. --Abd (talk) 13:15, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

By the way, if you wonder why my Talk page is semiprotected, just look at the history of this page!

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Hey Abd, if you want to have the protection removed from your main talkpage, I'm not going to be touching it - I'm busy with the arbcom elections and other stuff. Fred. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.77.17.220 (talk) 14:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Just noticed this. Haven't been so tight on my watchlist lately. Thanks, Fred. Appreciate the thought. There are others, though, one oddly enough from one of your IP ranges, though I don't think it's you. Good luck. Were you running for ArbComm? Wouldn't surprise me at all.... --Abd (talk) 01:19, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Surrealistic discussion of LENR-CANR.org and Jed Rothwell

I do not know if I am allowed to contribute here, but someone informed me there is a surrealistic conversation underway here about me. So perhaps you will allow me the liberty to straighten out a few things.

Several issues have been raised here, but perhaps the two most important ones are:

1. Am I stealing papers without permission and uploading them LENR-CANR.org?

2. If I am not, how can I prove my innocence? (Conversely, if I am, how can you prove I am guilty?)

I think it is easy to show that I am not stealing anything, and you can confirm this independently without asking me for proof, and without depending upon my word. I recommend the old fashioned, commonsense approach. First, let’s look at some evidence, including evidence you can find in a bookstore or university library, off the internet, away from LENR-CANR, where I could not have had a hand in creating it or faking it. Then, let us draw some conclusions from this evidence. First:

There are number of books in English and Japanese that mention LENR-CANR.org, and include acknowledgments to me, as the operator of the site and also as someone who helped write the book itself. See, for example, the books about cold fusion by Beaudette, Storms, and A. C. Clarke (“Profiles of the Future Millennium Edition”), Mizuno and Takahashi.

There are number of cold fusion papers in journals and conference proceedings that include hyperlinks to papers at LENR-CANR.org. Several papers mention me, in footnotes or acknowledgments. Two of the proceedings list me as an editor.

Several of the proceedings list me in the back as a participant, and they include me in the group photo.

So, what does this tell you? It tells you that the authors of these books and papers are aware of LENR-CANR.org. It tells you they know who I am. They know how to reach me. Anyone does: my e-mail address, phone number and mailing address is on the front page at LENR-CANR.org. It is proof that these authors have no objection to my uploading their papers. Some of them, such as Miles and Storms, have their own web sites, with pointers to LENR-CANR.org, so clearly they have no objection to the content there.

You can safely conclude that I am widely known to many researchers in the field, and that if I were uploading papers without the author and publisher’s permission, they would quickly hear about it. They would know where to find me, and they would tell me to stop.

You can also independently confirm, by various methods, that people download thousands of papers per week from LENR-CANR.org, as shown in our News section.

In other words, I am not uploading papers secretly, without anyone noticing. If I were doing it illicitly, without permission, I would soon be caught. It is also obvious that I have the cooperation of authors and publishers, because I have several original manuscripts in Word format converted to Acrobat. (Not the final journal format.) Obviously, I could only have acquired them from the authors themselves, and it is not likely that I am a cat burglar or master Internet hacker who has acquired them without permission.

In point of fact I have more than a thousand other papers in scanned format plus a few thousand others on paper that authors and publishers have NOT granted me permission to upload, and thus are not available at LENR-CANR.org. You can see the list of them. Several of these are critically important to the field and it is shame I cannot present them.

Let me address one other issue that has arisen here, which is: How do you know that the copies of the papers at LENR-CANR.org are correct? How do you know I am not changing the content, as at least one person here alleges? This sort of question would only be asked by someone who is totally dependent on the Internet and never knew the world as it was before 1995. You can confirm the accuracy of my copies by comparing them to other copies in libraries. All of the journal papers at LENR-CANR.org came from the libraries Los Alamos, Georgia Tech., the University of Utah and Aarhus Univ, and the proceedings were published by the Italian Physical Soc. and other organizations listed at LENR-CANR.org. So anyone who wants can read original sources and find out whether I have copied them correctly or not. And by the way, if you find I have not copied one correctly because of an OCR error for example, or because I have preprint manuscript from the author, please let me know.

That also applies to the official documents published by the DoE that people here accuse me of faking or changing, such as the ERAB report. Did it not occur to these people to go to the DoE, get the original document, and compare it to my version? Did they imagine I am betting that no one, anywhere, will have enough sense to do that? Such accusations are mind-boggling. Anyone with an ounce of sense can catch me or prove that I am innocent.

Anyway, carry on! No doubt you will come up with some other reason to censor LENR-CANR.org.

- Jed Rothwell Librarian, LENR-CANR.org —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.89.102.50 (talk) 02:46, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I didn't see this immediately. As you might have noticed, your discussion was, indeed, archived immediately. I restored it. It's still there. Please use your registered account, you are seriously harming your cause by continuing to edit IP. It's not about your rights, but about wikipolitics. If your regular account is blocked, sure, you could IP edit, though I wouldn't recommend it. Your IP edits are the primary reason lenr-canr.org has been blacklisted; without them, it would have been much more difficult for JzG to maintain the blacklistings.--Abd (talk) 15:18, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

This is not about me!

Greetings again. Apparently they have found a method of preventing from editing the Cold Fusion Talk pages. A pity, but the fun has to end sometime. If they do not want people like me editing, that's their business. I have a few more comments that are probably of interest to you alone:

You wrote: "Your IP edits are the primary reason lenr-canr.org has been blacklisted . . ." I don't see how that could be. It was blacklisted before I posted any comments. I did not know it was blacklisted until they tossed out Pierre, who told me. (I used to post comments years ago when I had an account, and I used to edit the article, but all trace of that is gone.)

You mention "Wikipolitics." As I said, I am not a member of the congregation and I don't know or care about the politics, structure, jargon or other inside-the-institution minutia of Misplaced Pages.

Someone complained about this sentence: "Your techniques are straight out of the Creationist's playbook and you should all be wearing tin foil hats." The "tin foil hats" is a jocular insult, but the Creationist part is strictly factual. Opponents of Darwinism and cold fusion are in the same position and they use many similar tactics. That is to say: They are both outside the establishment looking in. (I realize it does not seem that way to you, but it does to the cold fusion researchers.) There are thousands of papers proving that cold fusion exists, and they are based on conventional, long established scientific principles and instruments such as x-ray film. The opponents look around and find a handful of papers written by people outside the field -- mainly crackpots. These papers violate conventional physics. They give these papers equal or greater weight than the conventional papers. They strip out technical details from the article, such as high levels of tritium, and they use words that seem to call into doubt results that no serious scientist would find doubtful.

These people are also not well educated in general science. The other day, that fellow Phil took umbrage when I mentioned that the proof of cold fusion is based on conventional thermodynamics. He said something like "so is the proof it does not work." In other words, papers that claim to find errors in cold fusion are also based on thermodynamics. He is wrong about that. Most of these papers violate those principles, or other long established laws of science. By coincidence, Creationists also have confused notions about thermodynamics, and they say equally peculiar things which they mistakenly believe are based on those laws.

There are many other similarities, but I won't beat the topic to death. The point is, you get the impression that I am being arrogant, and someone else there apparently used this statement of mine as reason to ban me, but in fact I am only reporting the facts -- or at least, the facts as seen by all of the professional scientists who do cold fusion. If it sounds extreme to you (or arrogant) I believe that is because your point of view is far removed from mine.

(As I said, if it is okay to ban me for saying this, that is a Misplaced Pages custom, and I do not object any more than I would object to being banned from a Japanese tea ceremony for not wearing a kimono. * It is your club, and you can set any rules you like.)

The anti-cold fusion statements do not sound arrogant to me. They sound mistaken, ignorant and defensive. They sound like people who have not read the literature, and who believe what the Scientific American and Robert Park say about the subject.

Regarding Arata's views on whether he thinks his experiments are nuclear, I recommend you read his papers. You might find the reviews by T. Chubb or Rothwell and Storms easier to follow.

- Jed

• This is an imaginary example: I doubt anyone would mind what I wear. I have been to several tea ceremonies. The tea tastes vile. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.65.89.146 (talk) 21:06, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Blacklisting has had no effect, so don't worry about it

One other thing. You seem concerned about this blacklisting of LENR-CANR.org and some other sites. You seem a little worried. Please set your mind at ease. It is not having any measurable effect on our traffic. It makes no difference outside of the closed world of Wikipolitics.

Years ago I added to the article several hyperlinks to papers at LENR-CANR.org. This did have an effect. As I recall it generated ~3% of our traffic. Maybe ~5%? I think Misplaced Pages had more influence back then. In my opinion the article was better back then, if I do say so myself, since I wrote a large chunk of it. Anyway, this traffic gradually declined as people erased the links. By the time someone "blacklisted" us and cut all hyperlinks, traffic was so low I did not notice the change. Sometime later Pierre told me, as I said. It is unimportant so please do not fret about it. Anyone seriously interested in cold fusion will find LENR-CANR.org. I think Misplaced Pages is the first thing that Google finds. People who are casually interested may stop at Misplaced Pages. Lazy people who do not do their homework may stop. Or they may look up cold fusion at the Washington Post or Scientific American where they will find highly biased newspaper articles attacking the research. They will draw incorrect conclusions. Such people do not matter, and it makes no difference what they think.

Perhaps you take Misplaced Pages too seriously. Perhaps you ask too much of it. Misplaced Pages isn't bad, but like any institution it is dysfunctional in some ways, for some purposes. It is not a good forum for describing complex, controversial scientific research such as cold fusion. It is good for other things, so let's use it for other things, and leave cold fusion to J. Electroanal. Chem.

- Jed —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.65.89.146 (talk) 23:16, 31 January 2009 (UTC)