[extropy-chat] Elvis Sightings (2)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 04:22:02PM -0600, Damien Broderick wrote:

> As one cold fusion-supporting physics Nobelist commented acidly: 
> "What do you expect from a site where submissions are unrefereed?" 

But the point is that the man is completely correct. Peer-review
is supposed to weed out the crap. Life is too short do dig for
diamonds (which might be there) in a pile of manure.

Don't you listen? The overwhelming majority of the experiments
I've read (with a few exceptions) are sloppy beyond imagination,
the interpretations ludicrous (something blew up, instead of 
suspecting the obvious (air/hydrogen explosion) they postulate
a nuclear source.  Instead of ruling out the problem (argon or
even nitrogen is dirt cheap), they submit this to LENR-CANR,
and it gets proudly published!

Did any of you read the stuff on http://www.lenr-canr.org/LibFrame1.html
? Did you? Really?

Come on, do it. Do a representative sample, skim the papers,
and then come back to me whether you think these are good papers.
Whether the experiments are well-planned, well-executed, and well-interpreted.
These experiments are as simple as they come. Even if it's not
your field you can be the judge just fine.

> This is the tiresome downside of Nature and the other Power Suit 
> Wearers refusing to let their referees look through the telescope.

Peer review starts with reading the paper, and pointing out the
deficiences. If the paper looks like swiss cheese, it's sunk already.
Guess what? To my untrained and unjaundiced (in fact, I'd very much
wish the anomalous experiments *were* true, and if my life did run differently
you might even expect to find some contributions of mine there) eye most 
of the papers are total steaming pile of BULLSHIT.

So don't come with the usual (the establishment conspiracy), read the
things yourself, do the experiments yourself, and see whether you can
get those output-4-times-of-input (nevermind the kW/cm^3 power densities)
claims reproduced. The papers say they are simple to reproduce. So do it,
and stop calling it a conspiracy.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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