Cold fusion, Why not? Options

[One]

Perhaps all I'm trying to say here is:

Wouldn't it be cool to build a heavy water reactor as a wealthy hobbyist? Mining and refining your own uranium from western soil and having your D2O FedEx'd from Canada. Don't need no stickin' DOE and their red tape! This is the Great American West!

Man, that would be cool. I'd put it in a pit beneath a rustic shack on a red rock cliff off of the mighty Colorado. I'd heat a ranch with it. Maybe boil hotdogs. That'd be sweet.

[Milton Roe]

Not considered a hazardous material, not seriously controlled by the regulatory agencies.

Well, it's just denser water, so I wouldn't expect any special packaging, but I'm surprised it's not regulated. Could be used to breed plutonium in a heavy water reactor. That always seemed like it would be a lot easier than dealing with uranium hexafluoride to me.

About how much is it per g?

It's $500 per kg or so, in bulk.

If you look at the numbers in my last post you see why people are so careful with enriched 3% uranium vs. the natural stuff. Enriched uranium lets you build nuclear reactors a few feet across and weighing < 200 lbs, whereas with the natural stuff you need to build a Chicago squash court style beast 10 feet across or more, and weighing at least a ton. And needing a hundred kg of uranium and ten times that amount of odd and trackable moderator.

In practice it's not do-able. Or so we'll say, till some bunch of nutcases does it! It's sort of a 9/11 style attack-- it's very hard to defend against a bunch of driven people who are willing to think outside the box.

[CharlotteWebb]

it's very hard to defend against a bunch of driven people who are willing to think outside the box.

True.

Now if only this described the general public…

[GlassBeadGame]

What a moronic hypothetical.

Consider for example, that there are many possible substrates used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. However, government agencies tend to focus on the ones that are highly specific, indispensable, and required in bulk (like pseudoephedra) rather than potential reagents with a myriad of other legitimate and beneficial purposes (bleach).

For the sake of argument, if one wanted to prevent nuclear proliferation, would one worry about tracking the use of common materials (like steel), or of exotic and rare substances that are only produced at a few sites in the world (heavy water)? This isn't a hard question.

Wouldn't it make sense to track the substances that are actually dangerous on their own? Like Uranium or whatever?

It would seem to me that governments would be interested in discouraging non-essential uses those materials whose purchase provide a "signature" pointing to people who are using them for terrorism or other highly destructive purposes. These uses would amount to increasing the noise to signal in detecting illicit users. Thus if kits for "hobbyists" replicating kitchen top cold fusion or whatever make use of such materials they would quickly frustrate people tracking illicit use. I would think that given the consequences of failing to detect illicit use and the access that security services have to law makers that such uses would be promptly made illegal. The security services might even feel compelled to take some kind of action while the law was catching up with the situation.

[One]

It would seem to me that governments would be interested in discouraging non-essential uses those materials whose purchase provide a "signature" pointing to people who are using them for terrorism or other highly destructive purposes. These uses would amount to increasing the noise to signal in detecting illicit users. Thus if kits for "hobbyists" replicating kitchen top cold fusion or whatever make use of such materials they would quickly frustrate people tracking illicit use. I would think that given the consequences of failing to detect illicit use and the access that security services have to law makers that such uses would be promptly made illegal. The security services might even feel compelled to take some kind of action while the law was catching up with the situation.

"Terrorists posed as cold fusion enthusiasts, according to investigators"

That would be a bizarre headline. Actually, the concept is weirdly wonderful. I imagine a farce play about it. In one scene, a jihadist peers over a reaction cell, muttering about excess heat. One of his comrades walks in and declares: "cold fusion was only our cover story! Remember, we're trying to obtain nuclear byproducts." The CF jihadists shoots back, "but fusion promises limitless energy without the neutrons!"

[Milton Roe]

Perhaps all I'm trying to say here is:

Wouldn't it be cool to build a heavy water reactor as a wealthy hobbyist? Mining and refining your own uranium from western soil and having your D2O FedEx'd from Canada. Don't need no stickin' DOE and their red tape! This is the Great American West!

Man, that would be cool. I'd put it in a pit beneath a rustic shack on a red rock cliff off of the mighty Colorado. I'd heat a ranch with it. Maybe boil hotdogs. That'd be sweet.

I've thought of it. I suspect the DOE and DHS would be very annoyed if and when they found out.

Back in the day it was easier to do this kind of thing as a hobby. One 1950's book I saw with experiments for the home scientist included how to make your own home 6 inch cyclotron. It's not that much more difficult than a lot of shortwave equipment, or it wasn't back in the vacuum tube days. Kids did this occasionally for science fairs. You can even accelerate deuterons and do some modest nuclear reactions (not enough to give you any significant radiation, but enough to show that you split your own atoms).

Ah, shame that's all gone. Even without the security risks, this generation is no good for other than computer-games.

[GlassBeadGame]

It would seem to me that governments would be interested in discouraging non-essential uses those materials whose purchase provide a "signature" pointing to people who are using them for terrorism or other highly destructive purposes. These uses would amount to increasing the noise to signal in detecting illicit users. Thus if kits for "hobbyists" replicating kitchen top cold fusion or whatever make use of such materials they would quickly frustrate people tracking illicit use. I would think that given the consequences of failing to detect illicit use and the access that security services have to law makers that such uses would be promptly made illegal. The security services might even feel compelled to take some kind of action while the law was catching up with the situation.

"Terrorists posed as cold fusion enthusiasts, according to investigators"

That would be a bizarre headline. Actually, the concept is weirdly wonderful. I imagine a farce play about it. In one scene, a jihadist peers over a reaction cell, muttering about excess heat. One of his comrades walks in and declares: "cold fusion was only our cover story! Remember, we're trying to obtain nuclear byproducts." The CF jihadists shoots back, "but fusion promises limitless energy without the neutrons!"

Not terribly unlike making a hand built search engine and telling the help they're building an encyclopedia.

[Abd]

Progress report[...]

Glad to know you're still with us. When I don't hear from you for a couple of weeks I worry. BTW, do you have difficulty flying on commercial airlines?

Not so far, or, more accurately, not more than anyone else. And I just think about smuggling weapons onto aircraft, I don't actually do it. Had to give up a perfectly good pair of scissors, though.

In fact, when I was a teenager, my friends and I were sitting around and thought, "What could you do if you were really pissed off at the world?" None of us actually were, but we thought about stuff like that. And what we thought of was hijacking an airliner and diving it into the Rose Bowl when it was full of people. One of my friends then was actually a pilot.

So come 9/11, I wasn't utterly not surprised, and it seems completely insane to me that supposedly "nobody could have anticipated this." Why not? I'm not big on conspiracy theories, but the only alternative is a stupidity theory.

[Abd]

Anyway, if somebody even does a half-assed job of dirty bomb making in this way, the feds will clamp down on heavy water sales bigtime. No more jam-jar fusion experiments without getting the DOE licence and a lot of paperwork.

Milton (not telling anything the feds or terrorists don't know already).

I don't think that deuterium oxide is a particularly useful material for terrorists. It isn't regulated by the NRC. It's not dangerous. I also had trouble buying lithium chloride from a company. They say they only would sell chemicals to schools. Fine. I found some on Ebay.

There are CF experiments that don't require deuterium oxide as a special material. There is a certain natural abundance of deuterium oxide, and it appears that some effects can be seen due to that, under certain conditions. There is a project a little bit parallel to mine to reproduce the work of Oriani, finding radiation products from electrolysis of ordinary water using nickel, as I recall. However, those results are quite controversial, the levels are very low, albeit apparently above background.

What I'm trying to reproduce is reported effects, specifically neutron radiation, that are many orders of magnitude above background. But, as to terrorism, and to put this in perspective, we could be talking about a detected neutron per hour. This isn't useful for hurting people.

Is the sale of smoke detectors regulated? Could easily make a dirty bomb if you bought enough of them.

Strange use of the word "easily" when you consider the if.

Yeah. The source is 0.9 microcurie.

Am-241 is an alpha source, which means that you can handle it, it doesn't penetrate the skin. I suppose I wouldn't want to leave it next to my skin for days.... but it's happened that someone at a factory swallowed one of these things. Came out fine.... it's americium oxide, very insoluble. However, you could, I suppose, buy a huge number of these and reduce the americium and convert it into some soluble form, it would make a nifty poison, I think, like that Russian ex-spy who was fed some alpha emitter. In the body, if it can get up close to cell nuclei, it can make quite a mess.

But there are probably cheaper ways to make a mess. With nothing more than fertilizer and other common materials.

[Milton Roe]

In fact, when I was a teenager, my friends and I were sitting around and thought, "What could you do if you were really pissed off at the world?" None of us actually were, but we thought about stuff like that. And what we thought of was hijacking an airliner and diving it into the Rose Bowl when it was full of people. One of my friends then was actually a pilot.

So come 9/11, I wasn't utterly not surprised, and it seems completely insane to me that supposedly "nobody could have anticipated this." Why not? I'm not big on conspiracy theories, but the only alternative is a stupidity theory.

The big connect that most people made, and for which they interviewed Tom Clancy, was his 1994 novel Debt of Honor , in which a disgruntled Japanese airline pilot kills his copilot and kamakazies an (empty) commercial jet into the U.S. Capitol, wiping out a joint session of congress. Even Clancy didn't forsee hijacker-suiciders who would completely take the (dead) pilots' places, after take-off, with passengers still onboard...

However, I'd read the novel, and on 9/11 when I saw TV and heard they were grounding all aircraft to nearest airports, I remembered Clancy's discussion of the fuel/air mix, and said "Waste of time for half of those flights, which should be allowed to go on: nobody will bother to hijack a flight from one coast in order to crash into something on the other coast-- there's no fuel at the end. You only have to worry about flights that take off for one coast and then turn back, or disappear."

I proved to be quite a lot more prescient than Bush and the FAA on that one. But I'd had Clancy's imagination for my boost, so it was all less shock to me. I wonder if Clancy's ideas didn't make it to Egypt to actually return as 9/11.

[Abd]

I just find it strange that unaffiliated personal can have heavy water FedEx'd to them, no questions asked. I'm not arguing that it should be regulated, just that it seems odd to me. Perhaps they only ask buyers hard questions if they want to buy more than the modest amount you might expect researchers to buy.

It's hard to figure out what the U.S. company was doing. It may have been nothing more than a credit check. The company has on-line ordering, but I'm guessing that few people actually use it that don't already have an account with them.

Heavy water is expensive. It's not the most expensive material I'm using, but I need much more of it. I'm only using tiny quantities of platinum wire, and not too many milligrams of palladium chloride, and a very short piece of gold wire, but I'm using 25 grams of deuterium oxide.

Yes, the price in the U.S. was $580 for a kilogram of 99.9%. It's cheaper at lower purity, but the protocol I'm following used that purity, so that's where I'm starting. I would have paid $560 for the same D2O in Canada, but they also had it as 10 100 gram bottles instead of a single kilogram jug, and I decided it would be worth the $20 to have the sealed independent bottles -- and I can also sell it just like that to people who want 100 grams (for multiple experiments, to wash their cells with, etc.)

You can get it cheaper in larger quantities, I'm sure. But this is not a major nuclear proliferation material. And if a country needs it, they could make it. It's not hard to extract it from ordinary water, just tedious, and it's well-known how to do it. Lots and lots of electrolysis, takes a lot of power, but I suppose you could recover some of that power by how you burn it to get the water back.

Note: I am sorry. I revised that first highly rude sentence into a less rude paragraph:

This isn't a good hypothetical. A lot of components could be used to make an atomic bomb, but heavy water is unlike many of them because it is expensive, rare, and doesn't have much use beyond nuclear energy and research. You would expect research universities and corporate departments to buy it for biological marking and NMR use, and nuclear power plants obviously need it, but I cannot fathom why it should be sold to unaffiliated civilians. It's hard to imagine what they would even use it for.

There are quite a few uses, apparently. Also, some people collect elements. I expect I'll sell some small 25 gram vials of it for that purpose. So, my use: selling it to people who want to do cold fusion experiments. Perfectly sound business purpose, and I could have gotten the U.S. company to sell to me but it was just too much trouble, to provide them with the references. They were not looking for some kind of license.

Because of what some had written, I did check on licensing, both for D2O and for Am-241 sources. No problem. You can even toss Am-241 in a land fill, though they discourage it. It's not illegal. And they can be mailed. The radiation won't penetrate an envelope.

Larger quantities of Am-241 are quite another matter.

Back in the day it was easier to do this kind of thing as a hobby. One 1950's book I saw with experiments for the home scientist included how to make your own home 6 inch cyclotron. It's not that much more difficult than a lot of shortwave equipment, or it wasn't back in the vacuum tube days. Kids did this occasionally for science fairs. You can even accelerate deuterons and do some modest nuclear reactions (not enough to give you any significant radiation, but enough to show that you split your own atoms).

Ah, shame that's all gone. Even without the security risks, this generation is no good for other than computer-games.

Actually, there is a YouTube video about a teenager who has built a Farnsworth Fusor. It works, apparently. Deuterium fusion. But it's hot fusion, and it takes quite a bit of energy to do it, compared to the amount of fusion that takes place. It was funny to read the ignorant remarks from youtube users: this must be fake, if it was this easy, that a kid could do it, why are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to trying to build fusion reactors?

Of course, all that money is being spent to try to build fusion reactors that pass breakeven, i.e., that generate as much energy as is used setting up the reaction. Have any done that yet? I think it's been close, a few times. But, of course, for practical power generation they have to do much better than breakeven. Unless all they want to do is heat the neighborhood.

Any excess energy produced from nuclear reactions could be used for heating, because the heat in setting up also can be used for heating, it isn't "wasted." But when you are trying to generate electricity, the heat is wasted....

[Abd]

Well, I was banned for a year, the Cold fusion article stagnated. When Pcarbonn came off his year ban at the beginning of this year, JzG went to AN and suggested that he was "pushing the same POV that got him banned before," and the claque obliged with a community extension of the topic ban, based on JzG pointing out talk page posts where he appeared to be pushing a fringe POV by pointing to relliable sources. JzG didn't mention that they were talk page posts, didn't mention that Pcarbonn was completely not making article edits, and didn't mention that ArbComm had sanctioned JzG for his activities with Cold fusion. They just saw their friend JzG proposing something, so "Yeah!" "Yeah" "Off with his head!"

JzG, as he'd done many times, claimed that Pcarbonn was banned because of his POV. Maybe, but ArbComm certainly wouldn't have said that, it would be so obviously a policy violation. What ArbComm actually banned him for was for writing an article complimentary of Wikipedia, in New Energy Times, a cold fusion publication, where Pcarbonn described using Wikipedia guidelines and careful and civil process to "correct media imbalance."

It was completely taken out of context as presented by JzG to ArbComm. The field is an unusual one, where, for quite some time, there has been a gap between what is in peer-reviewed reliable source, and what was in popular media (the popular media didn't begin to shift until after Pcarbonn was banned.) In other words, Pcarbonn was arranging for the article to follow policy for science articles!

The usual. Pcarbonn was assassinated by JzG's framing of what he'd done.

I'm off my ban and now and made an edit to the article, incorporating what had been removed by WMC, in his edit under protection that ArbComm actually dinged him for. Then I self-reverted because I'm COI now, and went to Talk and proposed the edit, explaining the history. And, of course, they came out of the woodwork to argue a pile of irrelevancies. The usual, the usual, so what else is new?

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

And Tony Sidaway, of course, because I'd commented in some threads on Cold fusion where I didn't start the discussion, invoked the MYOB ban. I'm not sure what the "dispute" was that was a Wikipedia dispute, it was mostly off-topic rambling, but one of these actually mentioned my "company," and so I commented briefly.

I'm reminded of why I came to have such a low opinion of the non-recusing arbs and of people like TS. Pure wikilawyer, Tony is. He'd helped me get dinged earlier this year by editing a poll on AN to remove the bolding so that he and Future Perfect could claim it wasn't a "poll," because I was allowed to comment in polls but not to "intervene in disputes."

They really want me Gone, and they will do about anything to accomplish that. And I WP:DGAF. I do have a lot better stuff to do, and if their article on Cold fusion is about one percent of what could be written from reliable sources -- and that's probably about right --, so what?

They don't want people to revert war, they want people to discuss. Except they don't want people to discuss, if they actually discuss, with depth and sources, it's a "wall of text" and "Go Away! You're "dominating the discussion."

In other words, they are acting to prevent the only method of real dispute resolution that works to find true consensus: discussion in depth. That discussion can be moved to some other page, there are lots of devices that can be used, but they aren't interested, really. It is not necessary that everyone read that discussion. Discussion will find some level of agreement, perhaps, between those discussing, who will then present it to the larger group. It is standard, basic, deliberative process, which Wikipedia actually uses but which it has never generally understood, so it doesn't use it when it is most needed.

On Martin Fleischmann I managed a difficult discussion over the use of a paper from Martin himself. JzG had been revert warring over it. I kept refactoring that discussion to summarize agreements and keep the focus on what remained to be resolved. It worked. The consensus was real, and it was stable. Anyone could come and see the summary of the process on the top level, and could look at whatever detail they wanted. JzG really didn't like that, but he tried to neglect it and was reverted by other admins.

An editor who is very much anti-cold fusion, part of the problem last year, went to NYB and complained about my "walls of text." He'd seen a comment by NYB in the case last year and thought that NYB would be supportive. Didn't complain to me! just to an arb he thought would be supportive. These guys only know opposition and battle, the idea of asking someone, of discussing it, is completely foreign to them, and they see everything through the lens of victory and loss. Seeing the comments arrive on Talk:Cold fusion, Keven Bass was reminded why he'd been so disgusted last year.

Me too.

ArbComm doesn't care if admins or "productive editors" are abusive. It is terrified that if it reprimands or -- horrors! -- suspends tool use until an admin agrees to follow recusal policy or other policies, the admin and his friends will Go Away and leave the project hanging without all that free skilled volunteer labor. That's the real reason, I believe, that admin abuse is tolerated. Fear that the great hordes of uninitiated editors will take over.

It's essentially stupid, because abuse is driving away editors every day. But that's what it is.

I was accused of driving away editors at Cold fusion, though no actual example was presented. Yet I'm aware of real scientists who have been driven away from that article, whether by ban or by sheer frustration. One of them funded my "company."

Most of the scientists I know, and I now know many in the field, wouldn't even think of trying to edit Wikipedia in any fashion. And that's what I've encountered from academics in many fields. Bad Situation, and not getting any better, because ArbComm has been unwilling to confront blatant abuse, happening even on its own Arbitration pages.

Meanwhile, I really do need to do some cell fabrication, the design is nailed down, greatly improved, I believe, over my first concepts. I'm just slow as hell. But I hope to be running the cell for the first time within two months. So far, all I've sold is LR-115 solid state radiation detector material. Cool stuff, way cool. Cheap. Much easier to use than the more common CR-39.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

[Milton Roe]

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

You can see such a program in A River Runs Through It, both in novel and film. Its in the bits where Tom Skerritt plays the stern Scottish-American teacher of his sons about spare writing:

As a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by nature was a damn mess. And that only by picking up God's rhythms, were we able to regain power and beauty. To him, all good things, trout as well as eternal salvation, come by Grace. And Grace comes by art. And art does not come easy.

That is Norman Maclean also talking about his own father, the Rev. John Maclean, who flensed his sermons mercilessly of fat. The father would make his sons write an essay, then have them rewrite and reduce it in length by half, but still keep all the content. Then do it yet again.

The newspapers they later worked for, taught both Maclean and his contemporary Ernest Hemingway (whose summer childhoods fishing on the great river of the north in the early years of the 20th century were much like those in this book), to continue the same reduction. Maclean suggests Hemingway without ever naming him. Eventually, the more famous author would go on to reach the zen point where he began cutting out even "essential" information about emotion, relying on event description to reliably evoke feelings from the reader's common human experience, by suggestion only. It is the ultimate human-experience data-compression. Hemingway alludes to an iceberg-- the idea being that only 1/9th of an iceberg is above the water, but the rest can be reliably deduced and thus needs no description, if you can evoke only what one sees when seeing the visible part of an iceberg.

Allusion and metaphor also help in this struggle for minimalism. Abd, are you listening? Possibly you don't trust the reader to read you closely enough, to also get what you're NOT directly saying? But by expostulating at that length, you ironically guarantee what you fear.

[Abd]

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

Onandon Anonymous.

However, meetings don't last, because the speaker goes on past the closing time. (Seriously, I have very extensive 12-step experience. Someone with experience will maintain eye contact with the group present and will know when to stop.)
Wikipedia Review doesn't have ready devices for layering of text. Wikipedia does, and, further, I already put way too much time as it is into organizing what I was putting on Talk:Cold fusion into other than "walls of text," which has a very specific referent, and doesn't refer to length, per se, but to text that presents an appearance of impossibility of reading. You know it when you see it, and it's obvious. Some of these idiots just read the diffs, which then conceals the organizational techniques that were used to improve accessibility.

What really happens there, and this has become very clear, is that there are people attempting to maintain POV who don't want to learn about the subject. You can't become aware of article balance if you don't know the topic, this is part of the basic anti-expert problem of Wikipedia, that imagines you can come up with a neutral article by assembling snippets with no overview.

Was what I wrote there difficult? Some of it certainly is. I've become an expert in the field, of a kind, and I had the physics background. The most difficult stuff I put in collapse, but I sometimes assume that those working on the article have an understanding of the basic issues and science. For Wikipedia, bad assumption. I also assume, quite possibly incorrectly, that they are actually interested in what the sources say and what the balance of sources imply.

This is a major scientific controversy, the controversy itself has been covered in academic publications, more than one, but only the tiniest fraction of what is available in RS has appeared in Wikipedia, because those who want to keep their commitment to cold fusion being "pathological science" really don't want to see it. It might make them uncomfortable, and that is the real policy there: Do Not Make Us Uncomfortable, Do Not Present Us With Evidence.

At Cold fusion, there are, at this point, two editors who have some extensive knowledge of the literature, that would be myself and Kirk Shanahan. There is also Objectivist (V), who is somewhat familiar. (Uva Ursa has just showed up, with some knowledge, obviously.) Both Kirk and I are COI. Neither Kirk nor Objectivist understand NPOV and RS policy, and they continually wrangle over issues that aren't about reasonably possible article text.

At this point, the machine is starting to engage toward banning me again, I can hear the whirs and clicks. They are hardly subtle. If no sane editors show up to moderate, this reaction will go critical and melt down. Most of the sane editors I know have left. Kevin Bass has tried, but he's so fried by what came down before that I'm not sure he can be effective.

I've suggested an article "moderator," who would watch and refactor Talk to keep it on topic, collapsing, archiving off-topic stuff, or even deleting it, request that disruptive editors cease disruption, and enforce this if ignored, etc. That is the kind of solution that could vastly improve the way Wikipedia handles conflict. But watch and see if anything like that happens. I'm certainly not holding my breath.

The majority of arbitrators don't want solutions. It would make their friends uncomfortable. I can't tell you how much of a disappointment Carcharoth has been. Insightful, sometimes, but gutless. NewYorkBrad is aware of some of the issues, but is likewise gutless. He wrote on his Talk page that he thought I wouldn't listen to his advice. He derived that from his having voted "against me." That's part of the divisive thinking that infected Wikipedia. Has he tried? I remember NYB once warning me about some editing I was doing. I stopped in my tracks and never repeated that, even though I was likely "right." (This was about reverting the edits of a banned editor, who had been trolling by removing verifiable text from porn star articles that were apparently, to a naive eye, vandalism or libel. Complicated issue, one that Wikipedia wasn't, and isn't, ready to actually address and solve.)

They thought a mentor would be useless because they imagined I wouldn't listen to a mentor. The fact is that I listen to everyone, but I'd be obligated to listen to a mentor, or I'd be blocked. That's an efficient solution. Except that Abd is tricky. People who communicate with him extensively tend to end up agreeing with him, if they don't have an axe to grind that distracts them too much. They sensed, probably correctly, that a mentor would not stop me from doing What They Don't Like. Because the mentor would agree and permit it.

("Listen to everyone") If you look back at the history of my Talk page, since I came off block last year, you'll see that as soon as someone warned me, I agreed to stop the specific behavior causing the warning, even though I disagreed with the basis. That's what I did yesterday, too. I'm seriously attempting to avoid 'walls of text,' however, there is a limit to how much time I can put in, and when I'm asked a question, I consider myself obligated to answer it.

It's now been suggested that when a followup question is asked, my response should always be shorter than my initial response. This is so unbelievably stupid .... What this principle, if I adopted it, would lead to is a need to make the initial response as complete as possible! Perhaps unfortunately, I already do this to a degree...

But I assume that, as in conversation, if someone doesn't understand part of it, they will ask. So then, when they ask, the question may reveal multiple areas of ignorance on the topic, or misunderstandings, and if I haven't been complete in the original response, assuming that a person had background, I will then try to fill it in. Which can, indeed, take a lot of words, more than the original response, if it was relatively brief.

Facilitation of discussion on Wikipedia is badly needed. The software encourages hypertext, a classic solution, by now, to "walls of text" and "domination of discussion." It's easy, and, where I've had defacto permission to do it, I've demonstrated how to take complex issues and reduce them to layered discussions that expose the issues and show how they are resolved, in a manner easily followed.

But on Talk:Cold fusion, when I even edited to restore my own connected text, as I put it up, the relatively clueless but very pushy COI editor who'd chopped my response in two revert warred to keep my halves separate. And nobody intervened, which would have instantly resolved that tempest in a teapot. Most of the discussion on Talk:Cold fusion should be collapsed or archived. Try reading that page! My discussions there have, where left visible on the top layer, been focused toward proposing specific text changes and documenting the history of these issues, making it accessible to someone who cares about the article.

The biggest objection comes from Woonpton, who "wants to be able to follow the discussion on Talk," and apparently I made that difficult for her. Like it was easy before? But she hasn't actually contributed to content, and she doesn't at all discuss content, just me. EdChem popped in, with nothing about content, only about me, and went to Talk:NewYorkBrad to try to stir up trouble, thinking that NYB was likely to agree with him. He didn't discuss this with me on my Talk page.

I've been using collapse on Talk:Cold fusion to layer down about a third of what I've written. If I had the freedom to do it, I'd collapse a lot more, of what others have written that was off-topic. Some of my comments are exposed, outside of collapse, because they are specific response to others, whereas it should all be collapsed. At this point, it may be that most of the comments by number are attacking me, instead of discussing the article. But who is getting warned?

Edchem used total edit byte counts to exaggerate the "wall of textness" of my work. Which completely ignores several important factors: layering, i.e., the level of text in collapse was about one-third, and presentational devices such as sectioning with bold text, separated paragraphing, and smalltext for formatting or brief dicta. To actually determine if my level of contribution was excessive, someone would have to review the actual content, determine if it was off-topic or not.

I've suggested that ArbComm for matters like this appoint an "investigator," a neutral editor who would investigate and report. They could do this for lots of topic areas. Prolific editors, with most of their work being quite good and valuable, have been banned because of "walls of text" in Talk, when a Talk moderator could easily and quickly handle the problem without censorship, facilitating the discovery of consensus. By banning those who are highly interested in a topic, they are removing the most valuable contributors, and generally dumbing down the project. I've claimed that these highly involved editors could be considered COI, with their task being to advise the active editors, but that requires that they be allowed to freely discuss! People can ignore the discussion if they want, and it only takes one editor sufficient interested to read it to "carry the message" back to the rest.

Walls of text don't violate policy, but incivility does. Likewise presenting grossly misleading arguments on Talk, if that rises to a level where deceptive effect is a serious problem, is an offense that has resulted in bans (Wikipedia tends to all-or-nothing sanctions, very Bad Idea). I'm trying to protect Kirk, because he's necessary to have the true skeptical POV represented, but he really would like to see me disappear, even though I'm the only one who has attempted to preserve and make visible his published work and his Wikipedia work, and I'm probably the only editor there with significant understanding of his Calibration Constant Shift theory. (See User:Abd/Calorimetry in cold fusion experiments, deleted by claims that it was a "POV fork." Thus dumbing down Wikipedia coverage. There really should be dozens of articles or more. This is a huge field.)

[Milton Roe]

Rlevse took time out of his busy day to ding me for "walls of text." I wasn't banned from walls of text, though that may have been the real complaint of some arbs. They really don't like to read anything, it's too much work if it's longer than a sentence or two.

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

HK, I will take this opportunity to say that, as much as I disagree with your viewpoints often, I recognize that somewhere, sometime, you obviously learned how to write.

That's even true of SlimVirgin. I wish all screwed up people were terrible writers, but unfortunately it's not always the case. Likewise, I wish all evil people were slothful, cowardly, and stupid. But also, alas, sometimes it happens that they aren't any of these.

[Zoloft]

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

<snip-snip>

Tips from an editor-type:

• Remove sentences that duplicate meaning.
• Pick your point, make it, and move on. Don't embroider.
• Write for impact, and use active voice.
• Look at any sentence that has more than two clauses with deep suspicion. Kill one or more.
• If you think an aside would be good in a set of parentheses, you are wrong. Kill it instead.
• Group similar sentences together, and then usually you can pick the best one only.

With a little practice, you can trim down a huge amount of text in just a few minutes.
With more practice, you begin writing this way naturally.

Oh, and although a forum like this does not have a built-in layering device, you could post an essay in the Lounge, and then link it in another post.

This post has been edited by Zoloft: Mon 20th September 2010, 5:50pm

[Milton Roe]

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

<snip-snip>

Tips from an editor-type:

• Remove sentences that duplicate meaning.
• Pick your point, make it, and move on. Don't embroider.
• Write for impact, and use active voice.
• Look at any sentence that has more than two clauses with deep suspicion. Kill one or more.
• If you think an aside would be good in a set of parentheses, you are wrong. Kill it instead.
• Group similar sentences together, and then usually you can pick the best one only.

With a little practice, you can trim down a huge amount of text in just a few minutes.
With more practice, you begin writing this way naturally.

These are pretty good, although they lead to some pretty bland news-paper-ish stuff, in the wrong hands. For one, they give editors what they think is license to remove, wholesale, all colons, semicolons, snd parentheses, as though they'd never been invented in the first place. And then, sentence all subordinate clauses to serve as sentences consecutively, as it were. Cruel judges.

[TungstenCarbide]

I like cold fusion and I like you, but if there's a 12-step program for "walls of text," you should join it.

<snip-snip>

Tips from an editor-type:

• Remove sentences that duplicate meaning.
• Pick your point, make it, and move on. Don't embroider.
• Write for impact, and use active voice.
• Look at any sentence that has more than two clauses with deep suspicion. Kill one or more.
• If you think an aside would be good in a set of parentheses, you are wrong. Kill it instead.
• Group similar sentences together, and then usually you can pick the best one only.

With a little practice, you can trim down a huge amount of text in just a few minutes.
With more practice, you begin writing this way naturally.

Oh, and although a forum like this does not have a built-in layering device, you could post an essay in the Lounge, and then link it in another post.

"Omit needless words"

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Allusion and metaphor also help in this struggle for minimalism.

This is more to the point. You can be both more concise, and more persuasive, if you can find a way to communicate an idea rather than mere "information."