QUOTE(Mathsci @ Fri 4th December 2009, 10:34pm)
Does Abd's ban stop in time for him to vote? Voting stops on the 14th and his 3 month block started on September 14th. This issue could be critical for the whole future of ArbCom.
I would imagine that the block is set to automatically expire at the same time it was set, on the same day of the month. If it were more fair, "one month" blocks would be 30 days exactly. Why should the length of the block depend on the month and day in which it's set? But surely nobody, including me, gives a hoot about a detail like this. The whole thing was utterly arbitrary in the first place. What, exactly, was the purpose of the block? I'll say it:
It was to appease the cabal. Didn't work, by the way. The cabal still complained bitterly about WMC losing his admin bit. He's running for ArbComm. Now, that will be interesting. Maybe I should vote for him, on the theory that the worse it gets, the sooner it will fall.
QUOTE
And what's the news about his exploding jamjars? It would be a novel idea for a stocking filler.
I'll use this recommendation in the advertising.
"Mathsci, noted Wikipedia editor, mathematician and expert on the inside of his bum: 'Novel idea for a stocking filler.'"
Okay, not worded quite like that...
Unfortunately, not this Christmas. Starting with nothing in my hands except a dual power supply, everything is now together to start assembly of cells, except the drill press I bought was missing a part, and they are s l o w to replace it. I have all the materials, including a kilogram of deuterium oxide, that was the hardest to get. U.S. company didn't want to sell to an individual, but the Canadians had no problem, so it cost me a couple of extra dollars for shipping, big deal. A kilogram is enough for forty deuterium cells, obviously I don't need it for light water controls.
Palladium chloride, gold wire, and platinum wire are expensive, to be sure, but what's a few thousand dollars if you're in love? Besides, even if, in the quite unlikely event that this project is a flop, they hold their value. I can make a profit just selling them on eBay. So my inventory is money in the bank.
I'll describe the experiment as the first prototype will be run, in the page here on the WR article, cold fusion. Perhaps Mathsci would care to predict the results? I'm betting on what is found in multiple peer-review-published reports and similar secondary sources: I'll find clear evidence of neutron emission from a gold cathode wire on which palladium and deuterium have been co-deposited through electrolysis. I may see other stuff, too, since my instrumentation approach is quite different, apparently, from what has been done (but the actual electrolysis is an exact replication, only scaled down by a factor of four to keep costs low and to simplify analysis of the spatial distribution of the radiation). Today I'm starting the first control exposures of polycarbonate sheets to alpha radiation, from an Am-241 alpha source. Most households have a smoke detector with a handy one in it. My apartment now has one less smoke detector. Reminds me to buy one, it would be courteous to the landlord (even though the one I hacked apart was broken already.) $6.
This is much more fun than editing Wikipedia. And while I've had to invest a few thousand dollars in order to buy quantities such that I can sell the stuff at market for the small quantities in a kit, my customers will be able to run one of these experiments for as little as $95, if they have a power supply. Cutting edge science, $95? Local science-toy store owner, knows the industry well, was quite excited, says he'll connect me with a major manufacturer. I don't know if the market is large enough for that. I'm sure it's large enough for my tiny production. There is interest from a professor, a nuclear physicist, expert in the LENR field, who has grad students he'll assign the project, wants to buy a number of kits, and also wants to set up a distributor in India.
And most of my costs have been covered already, by the way, by volunteered donations and loans. Seems there are some people who trust what I'm doing enough to put their money where their mouth is.
However, for Mathsci, I could put together a special sealed cell in a Mason jar. With sealed cells and recombination in the cell, you can more directly measure excess heat, something I'm hardly even looking for in the initial kits (I'll log temperature, but that's about it). There is a tiny problem with sealed cells, even though that's what Morrison complained that Fleischmann should have been doing. If the recombiner temporarily stops working, an explosive mixture of deuterium gas and oxygen builds up in the cell, and if something sets it off, like the recombiner suddenly starts working again, well, the only fatality in the field was from that, and McKubre still has cell fragments in his body from it. I'll let Mathsci work with exploding jam jars if he likes. It's not my plan.
There is a fuel cell kit in the toy store that does the electrolysis, then reverses it. The box notes that explosive gases are released. But the amounts are so small and ignition so unlikely that apparently the lawyers let the company sell this to kids.
On the other hand, if you read in the news that a few blocks of Northampton, Massachusetts were mysteriously vaporized, you could guess that I discovered something new. Given that what I'm doing, in terms of the electrochemistry, has been done by quite a few researchers, with nothing remotely like an explosion, I rather doubt I'll become that famous. It's impossible, anyway, right, Mathsci?
The fact is that I may actually see (with a nifty microscope I bought for amazingly little that can make VGA videos at 800x) tiny thermonuclear explosions, likely less than a micron across, but they will melt about a 10 micron region of palladium where they occur, based on prior SEM photos of palladium deuteride cathodes. Nobody has ever looked live at the cathode on that scale, an odd lacuna. I'll simultaneously be monitoring sound in the cell with a very high frequency response piezoelectric transducer, and looking for voltage anomalies that temporally coincide with them, with a digital storage oscilloscope that I also bought. I'm amazed at what sophisticated instrumentation can be bought now for peanuts. The 'scope is new, far better than equipment I used when I was working as an electronic designer, I'd have given my eye teeth for one of these, and it was only $400 including shipment from China. Dual-channel, color display, 50 MHz, 2G samples/sec, long memory, etc.
I'll describe the neutron instrumentation in the CF article page. It's a heads-up for Wikipedia editors, because it's highly likely that this stuff will end up in reliable source. The grad student research would be done for publication under peer-review, for starters, plus I'll be writing about it, and I'll be collecting reports from customers. The kits are designed to be a standard cell, so that single variables can be studied by a wide range of researchers (including amateurs, but there are professionals interested). Nobody has ever done this before, even though the lack of such exact replications has been a major obstacle in overcoming the serious skepticism that was established twenty years ago.
This is about science, not about "free energy," and I have no idea whether or not it will ever be practical to harness this for practical use. The specific approach I'm using may be intrinsically impractical, useful only for demonstrating the effects, not for scaling them up. There are other approaches, developed in Japan, that may prove to be more practical: gas-loading of nanoparticle palladium alloy, recently replicated independently.
By the way, Wikipedia sucks. Nothing I'm doing is actually fringe or not established in peer-reviewed secondary source, at least in round outline, yet you will find no indication in the article of the solidity of this, and text based on reliable sources was roundly suppressed through revert warring, with one argument after another, invented as needed, and my very moderate response to the revert warring was what led to my ban, which ban interrupted a mediation which was being successful.
(That a gold substrate optimizes for neutron emission is based on two published experiments by a single group, so that's not truly confirmed yet, but that there is radiation from these cells is amply and widely known; that low levels of neutrons are emitted has often been claimed, by many groups, but until recently the levels were tricky to distinguish from cosmic ray background. The U.S. Navy researchers whose work I'm replicating managed to move beyond that obstacle using solid state nuclear track detectors placed in the cell itself, confirming work that began in China in 1990, which is my approach, but I'm adding a sophistication that nobody has tried yet, as far as I know. Multiple detectors sandwiched.)
Dirty tricks cabal or just idle talk?
carbuncle Dirty tricks cabal or just idle talk? 
