Abd

Link to the paper mentioned above, removal of lenr-canr.org from blacklist courtesy of Beetstra on meta:

http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf

This was a long time coming!

Thanks Sandstein. This could be very useful for me, but I do fail to see how this improves the project. Good luck. --Abd (talk) 22:27, 5 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

I see you are not working on the cold fusion article? If you are looking for a fun topic maybe you can do some reading and make an article about Bruce dePalma. There are over 9000 book references, scholar articles and news publications. The N-machine very obviously works but the article doesn't necessarily have to prove it. Just as long as there is some sort of article for this awesome scientific effort it would be a leap forwards for science, wikipedia and humankind :D 84.107.147.147 (talk) 06:24, 14 February 2011 (UTC)Reply

Look, Wikipedia is impossible. Highly notable material is excluded by MPOV-pushers. So what is this thing here: I find, right away [1]. Physicist Bruce DePalma has a 100 kilowatt generator, which he invented, sitting in his garage. It could power his whole house, but if he turns it on, the government may confiscate it.

Right. Like the government monitors his power usage and will raid his house if power usage goes down? Wow! Things are worse than I thought. Okay, okay, so maybe Depalma isn't responsible for that hysterical fluff.

[2] has some better information.

If someone wants to start a resource on Wikiversity, covering DePalma's work or any other fringe science topic, they are welcome. It won't be summarily deleted there, and can develop coverage of this; Wikiversity has a neutrality policy, like Wikipedia, but neutrality is achieved there through inclusion, not through exclusion. Personally, I don't have the patience to go through DePalma's theories, apparently others did that long ago.

I'm a firm believer in the importance of experimental science. Cold fusion began, not as an elaborate theory, but as an idea to test what had been assumed, that approximating condensed matter nuclear interactions by using 2-body quantum mechanics produced adequate predictions. Experiment showed otherwise. There is still no theory of mechanism adequate to explain what's known, now, about "cold fusion." The fuel, for what Pons and Fleischmann discovered, is deuterium, and the ash is helium, and the right energy is produced from that combination, with no significant radiation. But how this is accomplished is unknown. It is almost certainly not "d-d" fusion.

Given the fragility of the effect (it's not small, but it's chaotic), and given our ignorance about the mechanism, developing applications is very difficult, which is why most scientists in the field are now hoping that the theoretical physicists, who mostly abandoned the field twenty years ago, will look at the experimental evidence that has accrued and start to work on theory. There are already some physicists with expertise in standard hot fusion, working and publishing on cold fusion, but this could turn out to be one of the most difficult theoretical problems of this century. The math is horrific, for starters.

Someone like DePalma appears to have started from a theory, and then built a machine or machines. Well? Did they work? That's experiment. It's possible to get what appear to be small amounts of "excess energy" from various devices, but actually confirming that the excess is real, and not something like drawing down on the energy stored in permanent magnets, for example, or getting extra energy out of batteries by various devices, is more difficult. Someone pursuing a theory, without experiment behind it, can fool themselves for a long time, with this or that tantalizing result.

There is a current flap about claimed low-energy nuclear reactions in a device by Rossi, recently "demonstrated" in Italy. Because palladium deuteride cold fusion is real, an obvious inference is that other kinds of nuclear reactions might be possible, so people interested in CF don't knee-jerk reject something like Rossi's claims (which involve ordinary hydrogen and nickel as catalyst, though Rossi's secretive about what he's actually using). Rather, they will sensibly defer judgment; Rossi's promising a 1 MW generator by the end of the year. As has been pointed out, if he comes up with 10 KW, it would be amazing.... So we'll see. Rossi's been covered, I believe, in mainstream media, it might be notable. And I'm not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole, not here! Meanwhile, watch your wallet. --Abd (talk) 17:58, 14 February 2011 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Amendment#Request_to_lift_sanction:_Abd-William_M._Connolley

It's looking pretty grim right now. ArbComm appears to consider the offense of clear and strong argument on an article talk page -- one article -- more important and more worthy of a ban than an administrator previously admonished by them for using tools while involved, repeating that, with the same action during the case, and consistently and tendentiously raising rejected arguments about copyvio, and banning users by presenting highly deceptive arguments at AN, while defeating the sense and intention of many ArbComm decisions.

All that matters is how long an argument is. Write too much, ban!

This was my problem with this RfAr. Yes, I could have presented a shorter request. However, I already spent a day writing and boiling down this one. I realized that I just didn't have the energy to go further, to put another day into further condensation for political effect. I don't gain a thing from being able to edit Wikipedia on the topic. I don't gain a thing from being unbanned except for a possible ability to help out occasionally on a topic where I've become expert; I'm COI, so I couldn't do anything controversial with the article anyway. Why should I bother?

So I just filed the damn thing. If ArbComm doesn't want to look at it -- it's dense with information about the situation, and the purpose was clear -- if they just want to imagine that "the editor didn't change," which is preposterous, they can certainly do that. I stopped editing that Talk page, almost entirely, before being banned, because it was useless if the article was owned, as it was.

They don't care if the article is owned. They passed General Sanctions, but the only application was to ban me, based on about a month of discussion that the banning admin acknowledged was "not a problem, in itself," when another editor at the same time continued a long-term pattern of tendentious editing, removal of reliably source material, without any seeking of compromise and consensus, previously banned for this and then recently indef blocked for the same, but on other articles, and the admin previously sanctioned for use of tools while involved continued his prior campaign against old enemies (I'm only one of them!), etc., etc. They don't care! All they care about is that they don't have to read the complaint, and look at the evidence, too much work! And they are not interested, my experience, in how the structural problem of too much to read could be addressed.)

Experts are always interested in their topic! What do they expect?

In any case, this will leave me freer, if ArbComm ignores the implications, as it seems they are wont to do. I will have exhausted due process, which I had not done before. I respected the first ban, and had respected this second one. With due process exhausted, my compliance becomes no longer a matter of obligation, I have nothing to preserve, no quid pro quo. I've rigorously avoided disruption other than related discussion on an article talk page. I do not know what I'll do, and ... I wouldn't say if I did.

I'll say this, though. There are promises implied in "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit," and "the sum of all human knowledge," and there are obligations that arise naturally. Because the defacto process at Wikipedia compromises neutrality, which is essential to the understanding and realization of human knowledge, and because Wikipedia is standing in the crossroads, it becomes an enemy of human knowledge; many others have concluded this before me. I was holding out, and this may be why I left it for so long to appeal the latest topic ban. I did not want to conclude that.

Wikipedia has not seen what would happen were I to treat it as a battleground -- as has been claimed about me and others. I rigorously followed policy and respected blocks and bans, even when they seemed preposterous to me. At the end of the road, however, there is no road, no confining path, I can move in any direction, unconstrained by expectations.

I have my work at Wikiversity, which has been quite successful, for what little has been done. An extensive discussion with a user with a knowledge of physics there, at subpages of v:Cold fusion might seem to have been much hot air, but it led to a recognition of a lacuna in the experimental evidence on cold fusion, and there was a study done by an expert in response, which means that discussion led to the advance of human knowledge. (The expert is a skeptical one, by the way, but he concluded that the objection being raised to certain excess heat measurements was bogus.) While there were other reasons to consider this, independent verifications of results and experimental controls, this was an i that had not been crossed and the t dotted.)

Which is more important, extending human knowledge or writing encyclopedia articles about it in an extraordinarily inefficient way?

Wikiversity is not like Wikipedia. Content conflict is handled there in a highly inclusive way, just as it is in academia, overall. Wikiversity is not an encyclopedia, where there is a setup for conflict on every page on a controversial topic. Content controversy is rare on Wikipedia -- can't agree on a resource? Just create another one, linked overall in a neutral superstructure. Wikiversity allows subpages in mainspace, like Wikibooks, which helps, but Wikiversity also allows original research. Come on over and take a look, stop by v:User talk:Abd and I'll show you around! Cold fusion skeptics are quite welcome! --Abd (talk) 21:11, 29 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

As you well know, you are currently banned from "Cold Fusion articles, talk pages, and related pages, interpreted broadly", per Arbcom enforcement (and your appeal against this sanction looks certain to be unsuccessful). Your renewed editing relating to blacklisting/whitelisting a certain Cold-Fusion-related site ([3][4][5][6] etc) is in breach of this sanction, since the discussion is directly related to that topic area. I am therefore blocking you, for two weeks. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:45, 30 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

(I said I wouldn't comment, but I really hate inaccuracies.) "no blocks before this for CF topic ban violation, they were all about the so-called MYOB ban"? oh, dear friend, that just doesn't compute. Your 18 June 2010 block entry is marked as "topic ban and restriction violation", and, in the edit that caused the block, you wrote "will self-revert per ban on cold fusion, MYOB ban does not apply (...)"[7].

Comments by the admin who imposed the topic ban [8]: "The point here is that this is a topic ban. It's not a "you need to be extra careful there", (...) If you notice a BLP problem or other serious policy problem, pointing it out to people neutrally is a slight topic ban violation, but can be done in a harmless manner. I would like to generally discourage your doing it again, but the one you did earlier was appropriate for the encyclopedia and harmless. Engaging in followup discussions would be a topic ban violation. (...) Your efforts to wiggle around a bit here indicate that you think you can make positive contributions, that perhaps you need to be careful but that you can do so constructively. The topic ban is already past that point. It's pretty much a finding that we think that at the moment, any contribution is likely to be problematic, and that you need to stay away from the topic. (...) unless reviewed by them [the Arbcom] or a community board and overturned, please don't touch the topic area." This doesn't seem to allow "occasional non-contentious comment on user talk pages, with consenting users," as you claimed in your agreement to stop.

(@Abd. I received your email while I was writing this comment.) --Enric Naval (talk) 16:14, 30 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Enric. I'd forgotten about that one. As you may know, I consider and have advocated that self-reverted edits like that don't violate topic bans unless they are totally disruptive in themselves. I still think that, by the way, and, if I'm totally banned here, I'd use self-reverted edits, there is no way to stop it. I've suggested self-reverted edits to other banned editors, and they worked. Good content has been created that way, and editors have been unblocked, having shown a history of good edits, as well as cooperation with a ban. Self-reversion is cooperation! You might notice that you just helped me by taking back in content from a self-reverted edit I just made yesterday. I had no topic ban there, but the content was from someone who was COI, a personal friend, and I wanted to be careful.

In other words, Enric, the only reason the cold fusion topic ban has been effective is because I've cooperated, carefully. That edit that I self-reverted, which I was blocked for, wasn't actually a ban violation, unless you interpret the ban to be, not a page ban, from pages on the topic, but from any kind of discussion of the topic anywhere. But I was being careful. That (a total ban on mention, anywhere, of the topic and anything related to the topic) is not what ArbComm had declared, and as to the renewed ban, that's not how GWH had interpreted it, until after the edits involved. Which is why I stopped, immediately. Fortunately, my brief edits had raised enough fuss that the blacklisting was noticed. If I had not made those edits, my guess, the site would still be blacklisted.

Bans don't work unless the banned editor cooperates. If they don't cooperate, or at least go away, you get years and years of Scibaby-type socks, and probably a lot more that isn't recognized, a huge wasted effort. For what gain? Bans work where there is an open path provided to conciliation and cooperation.

A short-term block doesn't change my stance of cooperation. Indef or anything longer than a month probably would, if not lifted fairly quickly. The 1-year renewed topic ban was on the edge, for me. In other words, there are limits to my patience, as well. If it's interpreted to prohibit non-disruptive talk page discussion, on non-cold fusion pages -- which would include this page! --, as Future Perfect implied by his block notice, then I'd say that's it. Too far, too much. And I won't necessarily appeal to ArbComm again; at a certain point it's a waste of time, mine even more than theirs, and it would be much easier to just do whatever the hell I want. I've worked with seriously banned editors, covered by global locks, -- to re-integrate them and return their relationship with the community to cooperation -- and I know what it takes to truly stop an editor. It's impossible, in fact. You can just revert the edits and apply range blocks, and even then it doesn't work, it just causes collateral damage. And no gain. --Abd (talk) 16:43, 30 April 2011 (UTC)Reply