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Indeed. Stanley and I have never had a problem with Wikipedia.
Sincerely,
Martin Fleischmann, University of Southampton, England
http://www.alternativescience.com/cold_fusion.htm

Let's not forget that on the same topic of nuclear fusion American scientists have also been known to have spread misinformation by claiming to have perfected cold water fusion.

-FL

Check out http://www.alternativescience.com/james-randi.htm to see how he Mr. Randi actually handles challenges.

I can't believe I didn't know about AlternativeScience. I haven't laughed so hard since I discovered Chick.com (Safe for work, fundamentalist Christian website).

Actually some very educated people believed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. See http://www.alternativescience.com/skeptics.htm as a good description. I also seem to remember a quote similar to "ok, but it will never carry more than one person", after flight was demonstrated.

The James Randi prize is the biggest scam of sceptics. It is neither scientific (Randi decides ALL the rules and watches it for himself - no third parties or scientists), nor is is objective (Randi will harass you and call you a liar).

What is incredible is how easily persuaded sceptics fall for it: that this has any merit at all. It's a scam short and simple. Somebody running around trying to "disprove" everything he can't believe in, is just as much an unscientific believer as those he attacks.

The James Randi prize is the biggest scam of sceptics. It is neither scientific (Randi decides ALL the rules and watches it for himself - no third parties or scientists), nor is is objective (Randi will harass you and call you a liar).

What is incredible is how easily persuaded sceptics fall for it: that this has any merit at all. It's a scam short and simple. Somebody running around trying to "disprove" everything he can't believe in, is just as much an unscientific believer as those he attacks.

That's like saying that Microsoft is no more evil than Satan, or maybe it's like saying something's no hotter than the sun. Or no colder than absolute zero

Or no more links than in your posts. Yes, thank you, I think I got the point already.

That's like saying that Microsoft is no more evil than Satan, or maybe it's like saying something's no hotter than the sun. Or no colder than absolute zero

Experience tells us, and MS's court records confirm, that MS is a particularly nasty, convicted monopolist. No worse than that is faint praise indeed.

Evolution is a fact in that we know it occurs and it has been seen occur[r]ing.

Then people born without brains are not sentient? :)
http://www.alternativescience.com/no_brainer.htm

I don't know if you're trolling, but I'll assume you're not.

But the theory of evolution says that, given enough time, ants evolve into birds. (Not exactly, but you get the idea.) We've never seen anything like that. We've never seen a species evolve into another species through natural selection.

Give that this takes tens of thousands or even millions of years to happen, and human beings have only been around at most for 200.000 years (with only a few thousand years of recorded history) this isn't so surprising.

You should look as closely at the argument of evolutionary scientists as you do at those of creationists. Most creationist arguments I've seen attack older, no longer held, views of evolutionary scientists, and therefore are very bogus, even though they sound very convincing.

Take for example, the comparison between this account of fossil horse records and this criticism of fossil horse records. Note how the criticism only attacks the earliest held views, and handily dismisses any advances in knowledge made since then. I know, I know, anecdotal, like always, but I find this is an often reoccurring phenomenon among creationist arguments.

We're never going to have a perfect fossil record. Therefore we're never going to be able to prove evolution from the origins of life to human beings. This is a fact. However, it's just too big of a leap for a sane person to claim all the species we DO have in the fossil record not only share no evolutionary history, but all were created by God (even though they all appear in defined periods, and no species is available throughout the entire fossil record history) and most just died off due to natural selection.

Anyway, do a google search on "evidence evolution" 3.6 million results. Have fun reading. This seems a good resource.

No thread on maglev is complete without a reference to the fascinating Eric Laithwaite - see here for example. Note I'm not in any way endorsing this site - it's just a starting point. The jury is still out on whether he was a genius or a nutter, but I'd be interested to hear any comments about him...

Nature is pretty robust.

Don't worry about nature. There are plenty of examples that we'll make it worse for ourselves by continuing being ignorant and claiming to be backed up by science (it's NOT, science cannot back up something that is unknown and unproven).

A simple example on the back off my head: Imported rabbits in Australia: http://rubens.anu.edu.au/student.projects/rabbits/ home.html

Check out this website: http://www.alternativescience.com

YOU might BELIEVE evolution is random and not directed by any higher intelligence. That's an assumption you have made.

I don't believe that and I'm not a christian, or religious.

Have you ever stopped and WONDERED, just once in your life, how could all this around you not be directed by an intelligence, and not just random permutations? A small virus could easily kill off the whole planet, we've created several of them ourselves. Why didn't evolution create one?

In a sense everything is natural, and you're right that we're part of nature. However, we should start ACTING more like we are and not exploit everything around us for egotistical gains. We WILL sleep in the bed we're made..

Try to survive on a self-sustained farmland. If you pillage and rape the earth, you will not survive. Extrapolate that to the earth, and you're on the right track..

Ignorance has nothing to do with being christian or so-called "scientific". It has something to do with the ability to open the mind up for new possibilities.

Check out this website, found it a few days ago: http://www.alternativescience.com.

I'm not saying everything in there is true, but if you claim OTHERS to be ignorant, then I merely ask you to open up a bit more and see for yourself.

The problem is that with genetical engineering we're in a downwards spiral. As the food gets worse and worse, it's already losing its minerals and vitamins at an alarming rate, so will we. "You become what you eat" is not just a phrase, after seven years most of the molecules that you would call 'you' are gone. People are already docile, engaging in stupid activities and destroying their own bodies.

Then there's no way to stop the madness and stupidity. Do you think you can outsmart evolution/God/whatever you want to call it? You don't even know WHO you really are, how can you control evolution? Tuning nature into serving our own selfish goals will only lead to our own destruction.

I just saw a site the other day: http://www.alternativescience.com. It may contain some interesting thoughts for you.

10+ years ago I recall hearing about a guy who created a very similar sounding stuff I think he called it 'Starlight'. I recall a demo where he had an starlight coated egg resisting a blowtorch I think he was a hairdresser and had made it out of common hairdressing equipment/chemicals

I recall he refused to patent it (cos big buisness would steal it) and apparently refused some very lucrative deals.

Hmm google is my friend I have some references they guy was called Maurice Ward it was called starlight here are some references:- ref1 ref2

Check this out

I think this might be what you were looking for.

Kintanon

We can discount any "Species difference because of observed morphological difference" rubbish. That's the exact reason there were originally two species of Coelacanth when they were rediscovered.

Here's a link for you to read. Feel free to point out the obvious flaws in the arguments.

LOL, quite a good post after I saw this show on THC the other day about spontaneous human combustion.. Most posts here talk about the possibility of a computer starting a real fire, but I don't actually see a post where someone has actually witnessed one.

Some tests will be done, we'll read a few more cheap one page articles, and then never here from these guys again.

Just like Maurice Ward, the inventor of "starlite" plastic. Anyone remember him? He typifies how these "magic" discoveries turn out ... with the so-called inventor eventually fading into nothingness.

And for further evidence perhaps you'd like to check out this book, which is supported by Arthur C. Clarke entitled "Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed."

In addition to this there's an article on Wired about Cold Fusion here.

Then perhaps you'd like to read about how MIT devised a fraudulent experiment to discredit Cold Fusion here.

I have been trying to learn more about free energy for several months now. I'm probably wasting my time posting this because /. is full of pseudo-skeptics who will just flame me and moderate this down, but anyway...

If you want to see something different to all the people who make fantastic claims that they can free you from electricity bills and save the world and are either deliberate con artists or who never get their machines sold for whatever reason... take a look at Tom Bearden's work. It's all rather too theoretical and indecipherable to anyone who doesn't understand heavy foundations physics, to actually do much with, but at least Tom is trying to be scientific. Though I'm just saying that to placate the scientists... personally I think scientists tend to have a very inflated idea of their own importance ;-)

The most promising FE device I have seen is Tim Harwood's replication of the Adams motor. Actually the numbers haven't yet been measure to determine if it's over-unity, but it certainly does very weird things that are worth investigating... Tim says that at 3000 rpm and 12V it doesn't heat up but produces a strong ambient cooling effect! Furthermore, over-unity performance can be predicted for this motor using a simple combination of magnetic attraction/repulsion, induced fields in ferromagnetic materials, and Lenz's Law. I'm planning to build one when I can find the time.

Alright, this just really annoys me. Everyone is like, "this is just pseudoscience" when they haven't even read the book and given it a fair hearing, whereas few people are criticising Darwinism, but the truth is that neo-Darwinism has almost no empirical support either.

No, I'm not a creationist. No, I'm not crazy. I've just read this paradigm-changing book: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism by Richard Milton.

Let's briefly run down some of the key arguments: (see also this article which was censored on request of the high priest of neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins)

• We don't actually know how old the earth is. I'll repeat that, because I'm sure someone will say I'm trying to claim the earth is 6000 years old or whatever: No, we don't actually know how old the earth is. Given that realisation, there is then no evidence whatsoever that the earth has existed long enough for the tortuously slow process of neo-Darwinian evolution to produce humans. Rocks are used to date fossils, but fossils are also used to date rocks - a totally circular argument. All forms of radiological dating are very inaccurate and untrustworthy - recent volcanic eruptions have been dated to be "thousands of years old" using radiological methods. Uniformitarian geological theories predict that stalagmites should take on the order of thousands of years to form, yet they have been observed forming in mines less than 30 years old.
• There is no universally accepted definition, even among Darwinists, of what the word "species" means in Darwinian terms, so to even debate the point of whether speciation has been proven is to get mired in confusions. Darwin himself claimed to have observed speciation in Galapagos finches, but this was just trivial intra-species differentiation. No evidence has ever been discovered of significant speciation that could really prove, once and for all, that a man could evolve from an ape purely through natural selection of random mutations. It's all hypotheses - no matter how much Darwinists want to scream and shout that "it is not just a theory, there is enough evidence to be as certain as we'll ever be that it's true" - in reality, what little evidence of speciation there is (e.g. homological similarities) is purely circumstantial - suggestive but nowhere near constituting proof.
• What's more, random beneficial mutations are not just very rare, they're extremely freak occurrences - there is nowhere near enough experimental evidence of random beneficial mutations to believe that they are a significant factor in evolution (if it occurs) at all. On the other hand, directed beneficial mutations in microorganisms have been observed, as other expert Slashdot posters have already noted - in repeated experiments, beneficial mutations appeared far faster than would be possible by chance alone. (Of course, there is usually a nonzero probability of the results being caused by contamination, but that possibility doesn't help neo-Darwinism either.)
• Punctuated equilibrium is just an ad-hoc explanation to explain the embarrassing lack of "missing link" fossils. The only reason for adopting it is to explain away the lack of missing links. It's almost as bad as theologians getting around any awkward question, like "How did Noah's children reproduce without committing incest?" by saying "The ways of God are too deep for us mere mortals to understand."
• The idea that DNA entirely determines the characteristics of the organism does not sit well with these observations -

  "Fifteen years ago molecular biologists working under Dr Morris Goodman at Michigan University decided to test this hypothesis. They took the alpha haemoglobin DNA of two reptiles -- a snake and a crocodile -- which are said by Darwinists to be closely related, and the haemoglobin DNA of a bird, in this case a farmyard chicken.

  They found that the two animals who had _least_ DNA sequences in common were the two reptiles, the snake and the crocodile. They had only around 5% of DNA sequences in common -- only one twentieth of their haemoglobin DNA. The two creatures whose DNA was closest were the crocodile and the chicken, where there were 17.5% of sequences in common -- nearly one fifth. The actual DNA similarities were the _reverse_ of that predicted by neo-Darwinism."

• Limited Lamarkian change has been observed in the lab - see "Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare" by Mae Wan Ho. Larmarkianism isn't correct either as an overarching theory of evolution, but inheritance of acquired characteristics can sometimes occur.
• "Natural selection" is an empty tautology. Fitness is defined as "leaving most offspring" - so what it actually means is that "Those who leave most offspring will leave most offspring". Which says nothing at all. What's crucial to realise is that there is a related, non-empty, insight here - that the distribution of offspring with certain characteristics can be a factor in changing characteristics of organisms - and this is the insight that Darwin should be rightly recognised for; but it's quite a trivial one, and says nothing about how significant that factor is in relation to other factors such as, say, directed mutation.