Slashdot Mirror

Andrea Rossi
January 14th, 2012 at 3:21 AM

Dear Bob Norman:
1- please remember that the 1st generation of domestic E-Cats does make only heat, not electricity
2- when we will apply the electric generator it will be silenced
Warm Regards,
A.R.

see http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=510#comments

I invite Andrea Rossi to take part in a Slashdot interview, if he's willing to answer readers' questions about his claims.

The guy doesn't answer to us. We're not experts; the vast majority of us aren't even educated layman on the topic of nuclear physics. How pretentious and pointless is it inviting him to waste time justifying his "claims" to us rather than suggesting he have an open Q&A with the staff at CERN or something?

No, ask him http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/ - he just may reply. He's answered many questions (including some of my own). He's very humble and willing to enter a discourse with you but not indulged to explain some of the E-Cat's processes.

http://remineralize.org/

And such fertilizer produces healthier plants that need less pesticides.

"Biodegradable plastic made from plants, not oil, is emerging"
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2008-12-25-biodegradable-plastic_N.htm

"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

"More energy goes into making gasoline from electricity and natural gas than it would take to make electric cars go the same distance"
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"

Other approaches to all renewables:
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

Given the exponetial growth of renewable energy, and how PV solar panels are about to reach grid parity and the prices will continue to drop, I think we will be all renewables by about 2030 from market forces alone at this point. (Unless cold fusion pans out, or if small scale nuclear like Hyperion gets popular.)

Three quarters of US agricultural production also just goes to produce livestock, and the health consequences of too much animal products are harming people's health, too, so we really don't need most of the fertilizer we produce.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html

How to deal with the economic consequences of all this increased efficiency:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/more-on-the-future-implications-ibm-watson-technology/#comment-534

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/dispatches-heartland/2011/feb/8/ibm-watson-jeopardy-harbinger-vexing-politics/
"It’s hard to imagine the mood of the country changing if these trends persist. Will our bad mood turn to deep funk if we’re entering a period of long-term, systemic underemployment without even a hint of a plan for how we’ll manage? Does it make sense simply to hold on to our faith that eventually life will be like it was in the 1940s, 50s and 60s? It is marvelous to witness the technological advances brought about by human ingenuity. It’s a kick to watch computers compete against humans on shows like Jeopardy. But, IBM Watson’s real success on Jeopardy would be if it helps kick-start a meaningful political conversation about the economy of the future."

Solutions (my comments):
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
"The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach $0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some emerging trends:[8] ... Oerlikon Solar announced in 2010 that its 'ThinFab' production line is capable of manufacturing 143Wp panels at a cost of 0.5 euro per watt (0.64 dollars per watt) and has a capacity of 120MW per year. The company also claims that its production plants have very low energy consumption rates, so that the energy payback time of its 10% efficient, silicon thin-film modules is less than one year.[12] ..."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/nuclear-battery-can-be-used-to-help.html
"The Hyperion [nuclear battery] site claims to be 30% of the cost of natural gas approaches to insitu recovery of oil shale"

And maybe someday LENR "Cold Fusion":
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

Not to disagree that oil production has (or will soon have) peaked, but whale oil peaked, too, and we survived that, and the whales are better off for us moving on to other things, too. Wind and PV are here now, and growing exponentially. In twenty to thirty years at current rates of growth, they will supply all our power. And nuclear continues to improve, too, as with Hyperion, for somewhat the same reasons as renewables are getting better, more research, better materials, and a design focus on safety.

Look at it this way. We live in a community with lots of apple trees making golden delicious apples that are healthy for you and let you live a good long happy life. Those trees are outside everyone's homes. The problem is, you have to walk a little ways, get out a ladder, climb into the tree, and pick the apples. There are also rotten oily coal fruits that drop from the sky all the time. To eat those, you just have to walk out your door and pick them off the ground, although a group of people said they have first rights to them and you have to pay an annual "defense" tax just because you might pick them. Rotten oily coal fruits taste awful, give you gas, and shorten your life, but they sure are easy to get, and they are cheap at baseball games, plus you are already paying a tax for them anyway. So, everyone says golden apples are too expensive, eats rotten coal fruits insteads, suffers bloating from gas, and dies early. Whenever a few crazy people try to get together organized groups to pick the golden apples, or to make special equipment to make those apples easier to get without climbing trees, the large numbers of people who make money off of selling rotten oily coal fruits at baseball games beat the crap out of these innovators with baseball bats, and then they go around and cut down some of the golden fruit trees, too, just to make their point. Some scientists now say rotten coal fruits are not falling as often from the sky these days, and may stop falling altogether in a few years due to changing weather conditions. Is this a good or bad thing?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

The USA had no net new jobs during the past decade, but the GDP grew 40%. What is the country going to be like after another decade of that? That's what being "competitive" has brought us already.

How is the average worker going to compere with tireless robots with artificial retinas balancing pencils all day, or IBM supercomputers that can play Jeopardy, or voluntary social networks ont he internet, or just better design and better materials for longer lasting products that are easier to assemble? And compete at that all while demand is limited by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and by an emerging environmental ethic of Reduce, Resuse, Recycle? And still hope to have adequate wages with 10% or more unemployment for years leaving people desperate to take jobs that pay anything at all, even without benefits?

In short, they can't. Obama's economic advisors are fighting the economic battles of the 1930s, but in the early part of the 21st century. His speech just completely ignores the current unique situation. To survive as a democratic society, we need a mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democtratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence production.

See my post here for a summary of alternatives: http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

Or see this knol I put together for more on that theme at length: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2

Or see Marshall Brain's story "Manna".

I posted to this to Andrea Rossi's website, and I'll post it again here in case that site ever goes down (with some added links and some typos fixed):
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

January 22nd, 2011 at 11:33 AM

Andrea-

When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book "Midas World". It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called "The Midas Plague", originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: "... in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the 'poor' are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the 'rich' can live lives of simplicity." In that imaginary world, only the "rich" get to have small homes, to eat plain food, and to work a lot both to help other people and to tend their small gardens; the "poor" are condemned to living in mansions, to eating vast amounts of fancy food, to being entertained endlessly, and they are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves -- all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy. :-)

In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor's diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work"). But instead that fictional world ended up with "a snowmobile in every driveway ... and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand".

The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind's social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.

I'd recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I'm not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan's hard sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.

In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as people want to do them; people may otherwise be prevented from doing those things well by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thi

I looked at their "paper" at http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf and it has no information on the device itself, but does include some theory of how it works, but with no experiments supporting why they think it works this way.

Their only experimental result is their input/output energies. No measurements of copper, gamma rays, or anything else. It was reported elsewhere that when one of the people attending their demo tried to measure the spectrum of the gamma rays,he was stopped by the scientist.

So their papers have no supporting evidence for their theory and are not reproducible in any way since they don't describe their device. I call bullshit.

Supposedly this device is being patented. Can someone find the patent application to see if they include anything concrete about the device?

Personally, I expect they included something that reacts with water in the device (or some argolic fuel, termite, etc), heating it up for long enough to handle this demo. Longer demos require more fuel. Add something to produce intermittent gamma rays and you're done.

Either way, there's no point wondering whether this is true or not just yet (unless you invest in energy companies). Just wait a year. If their technology takes over the world then it was true. If they're still looking for investors next year, coming up with press releases and demos, then it wasn't.

Also worth mentioning that it's not exactly a fusion device. Supposedly the copper exist only briefly, decaying to a heavier nickel plus energy plus positron, (which annihilates with an electron producing gamma rays).

I do talk about escapism and drug addiction in passing here:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2

Summarized in a new way here:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

As I say there, after talking about positive alternatives of a a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence: "There are some bad "make-work" alternatives also that could prop up the status quo for a time and are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons. All of those just keep people busy in an addictive or destructive or mindless way to little good end and to little human happiness. Unfortunately, people turn all too quickly to those bad alternatives sometimes to deal with social problems related to abundance or uneven wealth distribution. I outline that in more depth in the knol."

So, I might consider drugs part of the "endless sickness". But maybe it deserves its own category for the reason you outline? Thanks for the suggestion. It also feeds into the prison "solution", too, as you point out. And, as you say indirectly, it connects to the notion of being a "Millionaire Wannabee" as well:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."

BTW, here is a way to break out of food-related "drug" addiction, in the sense that refined sugar and cheap salt and excessive refined-oil/factory-farmed-animal fat are all drugs in a way too:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
Combined with this or something similar:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

This 1970s study (ignored and terminated) showed that addictive behavior may be mainly a response to environmental stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
"To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments."

A claymation about that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3swVNAaoDgw

Could that go for computer addiction and workaholism and so on, too?

Its ironic how the totalitarian USSR needed to guard its borders to keep people from escaping, and we in the USA rightly said that was awful, but the USA is finding it ne

Similar: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

It uses high speed visual servoing to dribble a ping-pong ball and to toss and catch a cell phone.

Ironcially, I am listening to President Obama's speech as I write this, and his advisors (and speech) seem clueless about the changing nature of economics given robotics and other automation, AI, better design, and voluntary social networks (even as I think he means well and it is good for the US that he his helping create some jobs by increasing some exports):
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/01/obama-visits-ge-wind-turbine-plant/
Pres. Obama can talk all he wants about "winning a global competition", but the average human worker anywhere is not going to win a competition with advanced robots... Humans need to learn to "cooperate", not "compete".

Economic solutions (my comments):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2

From a comment I posted yesterday in relation to an (purported) demo of a cold fusion device:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

In brief, a combination of robotics (and other automation, all made possible by cheaper computing), better design (whether from cold fusion devices or thin-film solar panels), and voluntary social networks (especially with volunteers cooperating through the internet on free and open source digital public works), are decreasing the value of most paid human labor by the law of supply and demand. Cheaper energy will only accelerate this trend, since often you can substitute energy for labor and thought.

At the same time, demand for goods and services is limited for a variety of reasons. These reasons include some classical ones, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (with that concentration aided by automation, intellectual monopolies, and the rich getting richer and buying up more and more resources like land for rent seeking). The reasons also including some heterodox alternative economics ones, like people moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as they get a lot of "stuff" and move on to other pursuits than materialism (including spiritual aspirations, self-actualization, and social connections in communities), and as people embrace a growing environmental consciousness of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to protect the biosphere.

In general, mainstream economists ignore these issues or have very unexamined beliefs about them. Imaginative innovation, like economist Julian Simon talks about in "The Ultimate Resource", makes possible many wonderful potentialities if we think them through. Please don't let your inventiveness or cold fusion get blamed for any issues caused by unimaginative scarcity-based economic models held onto with almost a religious fervor by so many (see "The Market as God" by theologian Harvey Cox in the Atlantic). Mainstream economist have long used such scarcity-based models to apologize for an overly hierarchical social order that we probably did not even need in the past -- search on "The Mythology of Wealth". Still, some degree of centralization can be a good thing; see Manuel De Landa on "meshworks and hierarchies", and how they keep turning into each other and how all real systems are mixtures of both. So, we need to think and experiment regarding ways to allow our 21st century society to function in a healthy way given all the 21st century technology people like yourself are busy creating in all sorts of areas.

A New York Times article called: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of